Last night I re-watched Shallow Hal. I love that movie. Unfortunately, not many people watched it and appreciated it. Most reviewers panned it.
The story is about a boy who had a traumatic conversation with his dying, morphine drugged up father that convinced him he had to grow up and be with a beautiful woman. Unfortunately for Hal, beautiful women weren’t interested in him because he wasn’t great looking or successful, and he was noticeably shallow.
One day Hal was stuck in a stalled elevator with Tony Robbins, television guru. When Tony realizes how shallow Hal is, he does something to him, later explaining that he was “unbrainwashing him” from an earlier experience, and in future, Hal will only see people’s inner beauty.
Immediately after, Hal sees many women as being beautiful and since in reality they are not pretty, they respond positively to the way he is treating them — as being beautiful.
He meets Rosemary who is in reality obese. But since she is such a good person — a Peace Corps volunteer and a volunteer at the local pediatric burn unit — he sees her as being incredibly beautiful and falls in love with her.
Hal is happy as can be with his beautiful Rosemary until his friend Mercutio decides to find Tony Robbins and convince him to change his friend back to the way he was before.
I think what most people saw was this being a movie making fun of fat people. This was probably advanced by the trailer for the film which showed Rosemary diving into a swimming pool and making such a splash that it knocks a little boy out of the pool and a scene where they go canoeing with Rosemary on one end of the boat riding low and Hal higher in the air. The scenes are not meant to make fun of Rosemary for being fat. It was part of a montage of scenes showing how Hal and Rosemary were having a good time together with Hal being oblivious to how other people were viewing Rosemary. Unfortunately, most people saw this trailer as making fun of fat people and didn’t bother to see the movie.
Most people don’t get it. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, who played Rosemary (sometimes in a fat suit) called said www.theguardian.com/… But it wasn’t because of the movie itself. She said about her experience wearing the fat suit:
This, Paltrow says now, was not clear to her until she had to live like a fat woman. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand and I walked through the lobby. It was so sad. It was so disturbing. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese. I felt humiliated.”
At the time I saw the movie in 2001, I had some close friends that were fat. I was immersed in Star Trek fandom and for some reason, there are more overweight people who come to Star Trek conventions. This might have been because IDIC was an acronym for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, the basis of Vulcan philosophy, celebrating the vast array of variables in the universe.
Two of my friends wished they could find boyfriends or husbands, but because of their obesity, that was unlikely. These friends were very good people and I often wished that other people could see the good in them.
So when I saw Shallow Hal, it made me happy to experience the fantasy of a world where a guy could look at my friends and see beyond their looks to their inner beauty.
Some things in the movie resonate with me. For example, the scene outside of the restaurant where two guys make fun of Rosemary. This reminded me of a time my friends and I were at a Mexican restaurant and the waiter was rude to us. Or the time one friend went to a public swimming pool and was driven away by some teenagers taunting her.
The movie is not about how great it would be to change unattractive people to become attractive. Rosemary has no interest in losing 200 lbs. so she could be attractive. The unattractive girls dancing at the nightspot aren’t staying home alone, they’re out partying together, having a good time despite the disapproval of the other people.
When I watched Shallow Hal, I never got the message that unattractive people should be hidden away or that overweight people need to lose a couple of hundred pounds. I’m getting the message that people — even fat and unattractive people — have something to contribute to this world and have as much right to have a good time as anybody.
One of the men Hal and Mercutio see frequently is Walt, a man with spina bifida. They see him showing off, doing pullups and joking around at the club. Mercutio is disgusted about Walt making a spectacle of himself. Hal says, “Lighten up, he’s just making the best of the hand he was dealt.” I love that line and feel like it’s really the theme of the movie, “making the best of the hand you’re dealt.”