Offensive As Hell: I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Come to think of it, I don't even know why I watched that movie. It had Adam Sandler in it. That should have been enough to put me off, except I was naive and idealistic enough to think that being a comedy about gay people might counteract the involvement of Adam Sandler. I was very, very wrong.

For those unaware, the plot runs like this: Chuck and Larry are two straight, white firefighters and best friends. Larry is a lovable fat guy whose wife died about a year ago, and Chuck is his slimmer, sexier, perpetually single best friend who gets laid at a rate of about 1.5 women per night. Larry realizes that, with his wife dead, he doesn't have a beneficiary for his life insurance, and that it's too late to change it to his kids. He's got to find a beneficiary or else his insurance will expire. In a fit of mad inspiration, he discovers that gays have just been given civil partnership laws in his state (New York, where all the cool movies happen), and so he hatches a mad plan: obtain civil partnership with Chuck, making him beneficiary of his insurance policy.

What a wacky plan, right? This poor, dear man is so desperate to take care of his kids that he'd do anything - even marry his male best friend - to make sure that they were taken care of in the untimely event of his death. Isn't that amazing?

No.

The movie is nothing short of a train wreck from beginning to end. While the creators took a stab at making Chuck and Larry likable, forgivable characters, the movie is so deeply entrenched in "irreverence" (read: toilet humor and complete insensitivity) that you end up too mad at its creators to even care about Larry's motives.

No, I take that back. The fact that the movie's writers obviously thought they were being sensitive about the issue made it even worse.

The movie starts out with a scene that's going to set the tone for everything to come: our two main characters, out on a call, struggling to rescue a hugely obese man from a burning building. The man insists that he is too fat to walk, so the characters end up carrying him out on his bed (or something else equally huge; I don't remember exactly). The entire scene is disparaging and generally insensitive of this kind of obesity, playing it (like everything else) for laughs. Given that the man's fatness has absolutely nothing to do with the remainder of the story, it feels pointless, jarring, and just dumb. The only thing I can figure is that it serves as a kind of litmus test for the rest of the film: if you liked that scene, you'll enjoy the rest of the movie; if not, please get in line for your refund. I probably should have stopped watching there, but like I said, naive and idealistic. Moving on.

During this brave rescue, there is an accident and Chuck is injured. Larry rescues him, ensuring that Chuck will forever feel indebted to him, and reminding him of his own fragile mortality. That's when he abruptly decides to check up on his own life insurance (or something like that), only to find out that while he could have named his kids as beneficiaries back when his wife died, the only way he could get a new beneficiary now is if he got married.

So he talks Chuck into signing up for civil partnership (remember, he owed him - otherwise there's no way in Hell he'd have OH MY GOD ACTUALLY MARRIED A MAN EEW EEW EEW), and they start down the path of their whole gay-marriage charade: Chuck moves into Larry's house, they put up a rainbow flag, they drive up to Canada and get married for realz (by a disturbing pseudo-Asian guy who seems to get voyeuristic thrills from the weddings he performs), they start attending gay parties, the whole nine yards. Along the way, they deal with Larry's gender-nonconformist son, squick out the rest of the firefighting team (with one exception, as follows), inspire a fellow fireman to come out of the closet, punch out an anti-gay protester, and generally come to the realization that being gay is OK after all. At the end, when the fraud is exposed, all the gay people that they've met over the course of the movie cheer for them. Never mind that they lied to everyone; never mind that they exploited the newly-granted rights of second-class citizens for their own gain, never mind that their attitude throughout the entire movie is "it's okay for you to be gay, but for me it's disgusting." Never mind that, as the movie explicitly states, by committing this fraud they're making things harder for all the genuine gay couples who want civil partnerships. They have learned a valuable lesson about gay people and acceptance, and so they are now heroes. Somehow.

The really sad part is that, even though this is supposed to be a movie about how gay people are people too and deserve to be treated as such, the movie is about straight people. Straight people who, from beginning to end, can imagine no worse fate than to be gay. Straight people who waltz into the gay scene, fool everyone despite their obvious disgust for anything resembling physical intimacy for one another (though a threesome with a blow-up doll is apparently okay... yeah) suffer a little bit of discrimination, strike an epic blow for gay people everywhere, and then emerge from the experience more-or-less unscathed. (They do get arrested, but because of the outcry from the gay community the charges end up dropped.) In fact, they come out better for the experience, as Chuck and Larry both find super-hot women that they can start dating now that they're not gay anymore.

Don't be fooled by its appearance. This isn't a movie about gay people, or even about gay acceptance. It's a movie that exploits the lives and problems of actual gay people (and several fake ones) for cheap laughs, without giving them the dignity of an actual voice in the film. (The closest that they get when a gay character speaks up to praise one of the protagonists for their courage/inspiring actions/whatnot.) This movie is, in essence, a straight guilt film - and a bad one at that. (See also "white guilt films," the genre from which this movie gets most of its cues.)

The really sad thing in all of this is that the premise of this movie could have done better. For instance, if the jokes had been less rude and in-your-face; if the main characters had had some actual hesitations about what they were about to do (besides "EEW EEW GAY NASTY"). If they'd actually learned something. If they, instead of the gay community, had been the butt of the movie's jokes. If everything hadn't turned out magically sunshine-and-rainbows (but EEW NOT RAINBOWS EEW GAY) in the end. If they'd accepted that the audience was going to hate the protagonists and ran with it, instead of trying repeatedly to garner our sympathy, it could have worked.

But they couldn't do that. After all, Adam Sander was in this movie, and nothing is more important than his ego.

(Incidentally, what is it with the portrayal of gay black men in comedy films? Did I miss the memo from the black gay community that they're all big, scary-looking men who secretly just want some romance? Naw, I'm nitpicking. This entire movie was so clueless that I shouldn't bother expecting any better.)