'I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry' review

Rating: * out of ****

What a sad, frightened film this is. ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry’ could have been a comedy with a heart, a message and the gross-out humor to match it if only it had the guts to stand up for that message from the get-go. Instead, it operates on constant gay jokes, racism and homophobia. I understand that gay jokes come with the territory. After all, it’s a film about two straight men pretending to be gay. However, the tone of most of these jokes are not parody, they are cheap and obvious. I’m sure it is a well-intentioned film, but nevertheless.

Adam Sandler and Kevin James star as Brooklyn Firefighters, Chuck and Larry. Two years after the death of Larry’s wife, his insurance benefits lapse because he has not claimed a new beneficiary. Being that the date for submitting has passed, Larry (James) fears that his kids will be orphaned if something happens to him in the line of duty. Uh huh.

In order to fix the situation, Larry hatches a scheme to fake a domestic partnership with his best friend Chuck (Sandler). With good reason, people are skeptical that these two are for real and an investigation begins that may ultimately reveal the characters’ fraud. They are assigned a defense lawyer to help with the case played by Jessica Biel. I like Biel, but it pained me to see her phoning it in so badly. Her character is a hapless twit who freaks out after a moment of embrace between her and the Sandler character, and yet earlier in the film she had no qualms about letting him grope her breasts.

Chuck is a womanizer. Every woman he encounters is unattainably attractive and, most of the time, brain-dead and easy. It’s hard to believe so many women would be attracted to him. Not only is he unattractive, Chuck is a pompous, manipulating pig who only seems to objectify women. And in what world is Adam Sandler a calendar model?

Larry is a widower and family man. He has a son who seems to be gay. How do the filmmakers get this across to the audience? By implying, ‘the kid’s weird because he likes to sing and thinks cockroaches are icky.’ It doesn’t help either that Larry seems afraid of his son most of the time or that he endlessly tries to pressure the kid into baseball over dance recitals. By the way, I’m heterosexual and I think cockroaches are icky too.

Chuck and Larry’s perceptions of homosexuals are exaggerated - they have to be or it wouldn’t work very well as a comedy, not that it does anyway. However, their perceptions are based on the shallowest stereotypes. The writers’ seem to think, ‘Since Chuck and Larry are straight men acting gay then both sides must be represented in the basest of ways in order to keep the distinction clear’. The funny thing is that even when Chuck and Larry are straight, it is also based on stereotypes: they’re firefighters who play basketball, the Brooklyn environment provides them with the go-to accent for sounding tough, sports are better than arts, sleeping with endless women is better than just one, etc. The protagonists have to be as masculine as they can be so it will be that much funnier when they act gay. Uh huh.

The main problem with ‘Chuck & Larry’ is that it can’t seem to decide which side of the fence it’s sitting on. It wants to be left wing and support the homosexual communities, yet at every turn there are badly drawn jokes and moments that only fuel the right-wingers’ anti-gay fire. This movie wants to have its cake and eat it too – it wants to get the glory of being a pro-gay movie while at the same time squirming in its seat. You can’t have ninety minutes of gay jokes and then slap on a ham-fisted message in the last twenty minutes and think everything is OK. Even when there seems to be a ray of light with a moment of sincerity or endearment, it is buried under the refuse of clichés and formulas. I pitied Dan Ackroyd when he had to simultaneously be the last minute witness, and deliver a tired filibuster.

Note: Rob Schneider hits new lows here as an Asian minister in Canada. It’s a rip-off of Mickey Rooney’s character Mr. Yunioshi from ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’. Was it ironic to anyone else that Chuck and Larry come to a place that is more accepting and yet contains the harshest ignorance in the film?