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Me, Myself & Irene
Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly
Starring Jim Carrey, Renee Zellweger, Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins, Robert Forster, Anthony Anderson, Mongo Brownlee, Jerod Mixon

Peter and Bobby Farrelly, better known as the Farrelly Brothers, burst on to Hollywood's A-list in 1994 when their movie Dumb and Dumber grossed $340 million worldwide. It wasn't until two summers ago, however, after the enormous success of There's Something About Mary, that they became a household name. Suddenly, every comedic film was being compared to The Farrelly Bros., and screenwriters rushed to fill their scripts with gross-out humor.

What got lost in this frenzy was that the Farrelly brothers' movies are more apt to be stupid than funny and--this is the point most often overlooked--more likely to be sweet and good-natured than gross and disgusting. Think of Randy Quaid's Amish bowler in 1996's Kingpin, a gentle soul who is incapable of comprehending deceit, or Cameron Diaz's Mary who, despite being drop-dead gorgeous, is perfectly content to hang out with a bunch of geeks. The same is true of last year's Outside Providence, a disappointing movie about finding yourself (and love) at boarding school. Surprised by its genial tone and lack of comedy, critics reminded audiences that the Farrelly brothers had only written this script, and early in their careers at that. But after watching Me, Myself & Irene, I've come to think that movies like Outside Providence and Kingpin are more representative of the Farrelly brothers history than There's Something About Mary.

Me, Myself & Irene opens with a shot of Jim Carrey, who plays a Rhode Island state cop, riding his police motorcycle along the ocean shoreline. It's a picturesque sequence that goes on a while and ends just as calmly as it began. No Carrey falling off his bike, no encounter with some deranged criminal, not a single joke, in fact. Just a little tribute to the Farrelly brothers' home state, that's all.

This isn't to say that the rest of the movie is one placid ride down the road. For one, it stars Jim Carrey as a cop with a split personality, both sides of which fall in love with the same woman, Irene (Renee Zellweger, Jerry Maguire). It also features an African-American midget, three overweight triplets who happen to be geniuses, a cow that refuses to die, a squeaking nose, a psychotic albino, and a vast government conspiracy that is trying to track down Irene. Oh, did I mention a quasi-sexual encounterwith a chicken and enough swearing to make Chris Rock blush?

So, is there a plot in the midst of this freak show? Only the barest of ones. You see, Irene is a good girl who got mixed up with the wrong crowd. What's wrong about this crowd? Well, we're not so sure, but it's something bad, given how hard they try to kill Irene and Charlie/Hank (that's the two names for the cop's personalities).

Why does Charlie have a split personality? Well, you see, Charlie's been a doormat his whole adult life he let his wife have an affair (which led to the aforementioned triplets), then raised her kids after she walked out on him. But his ex isn't the only person stepping on Charlie--his neighbor's dog defecates on his yard, people cut in front of him at the store, and even a little girl with the jump rope tells him to mind his own business, though not in those words. And one day Charlie just snaps, and out pops Hank, who takes, shall we say, a more aggressive view (his second act is to drown the little girl, his first act is unmentionable in a family paper).

Hooked together for reasons too nebulous to mention, Charlie/Hank and Irene spend most of the movie fleeing the corrupt cops (Chris Cooper, American Beauty; and Richard Jenkins, What Planet Are You From?). This creates a road trip feel without any sort of destination. Wandering from train to motel to convertible, our heroes quickly fall in love, though what Irene sees in either Charlie or Hank is beyond me. But the same could be said for the heroes in the last two Farrelly brothers' flicks, and that didn't stop them from the getting the gorgeous blonde.

What the audience really cares about, though, is whether Me, Myself & Irene is funny; and the answer is only occasionally. Jim Carrey rarely cuts loose and, when he does, he's merely imitating Steve Martin's great All of Me performance or his own In Living Color characters. Zellweger is just a blank face with scraggly hair who can't make herself or the audience believe what's going on around her. And Chris Cooper and Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) fare poorly in their comedic debuts. Only Anthony Anderson (Big Momma's House), Mongo Brownlee (Con Air), and Jerod Mixon (Bulworth) score laughs as the gigantic trio of geniuses that come to Carrey's rescue.

The film's final credit sequence, like its opening one, is an apt metaphor for the movie. Instead of the expected bloopers segments, the movie shows still photos that identify all of the minor characters and extras. And it's not just a few pics, either, but at least a few dozen. It's a sweet gesture to folks often overlooked, many of whom are probably friends of the directors, but it's also a boring way to end a Jim Carrey comedy. Sweet and dull. Unfortunately, this movie has too much of both.

 J. Robert Parks 07/01/2000