![]() And its grim condescensions remain familiar. Peter calls it a valentine for overweight people.” The Farrellys, he said, “are not making fun of weight, they are embracing her weight. The film’s makeup-effects designer, Tony Gardner-the orchestrator of Paltrow’s fat suit-echoed this claim. “This movie’s heart is in the right place,” Peter Farrelly insisted when Shallow Hal premiered. That it treated Rosemary’s weight as setup and punch line at once was apparently just part of the satire. It was exploring the meaning of a big body in a world that makes space only for small ones. The people who were offended by the movie, they insisted, had missed the point the film was challenging callous stereotypes, not endorsing them. In promoting the film, the Farrellys tried to argue that Shallow Hal was similarly nuanced. Shallow Hal was directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who had previously brought to the world Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and other films known for their giddy unions of humor and heart. “Sorry,” she says, somehow both defined by her size and oblivious to it. And when she and Hal go swimming, Rosemary, diving in, creates a wave so powerful that it deposits a kid into a tree. When she and Hal go canoeing, Hal’s side of the boat tips into the air, like a seesaw trapped in the upswing. Over the course of the movie, Rosemary breaks not one but two seats: a flimsy chair at a burger joint and a booth at a fancier restaurant. Twentieth Century Fox / The Hollywood Archive / Alamyĭoes the spell eventually break? Does Hal finally see Rosemary as she is? Does this celebration of Rosemary’s personality offer a torrent of jokes about Rosemary’s body? Yes. “The biggest love story ever told,” its promotional poster promises with a wink. That interplay of vision and reality-the cosmic wrongness of Hal’s perception-is the film’s defining joke. Filtered through Hal’s new gaze, though, she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow. Rosemary looks like Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. ![]() ![]() Then he meets Rosemary Shanahan (Paltrow), who is smart and funny and fun and kind, and who weighs about 300 pounds. Robbins hypnotizes Hal, ensuring that he will see people’s inner beauty reflected on the outside. One day, through the combined forces of magical realism and the self-help seller Tony Robbins, Hal gets an attitude adjustment. Hal Larson (played by Jack Black) is a generally sweet guy with an overarching flaw: He judges women by their appearance, refusing to pursue romantic relationships with women who don’t look like models. Shallow Hal could never decide whether Rosemary was a human or a humiliation. And it speaks to a culture that still interprets fatness as a condition that deserves whatever mockery it might get. It has expanded its reach through streaming services, where it is popular and even beloved. On the contrary, it has retained a revealing currency. (Paltrow herself, expressing regret last year about her part in the film, called it a “disaster.”) But Shallow Hal has not been relegated to the annals of cinematic shame. It’s tempting, 20 years later, to look back on Shallow Hal and feel we have cause for congratulation: The movie is bad, and we know it’s bad, so progress must have been made. From the moment it premiered, in early November of 2001, it was poorly aged. Shallow Hal is a fat joke with a 114-minute run time. Paltrow’s assessment of this experience- apparently funny, not all funny-doubles as a pretty decent review of the film she was trying to promote. “I thought the whole thing would be funny, and then as soon as I put it on, I thought, well, you know, this isn’t all funny.” “I didn’t expect it to feel so upsetting,” she told another. She noticed how people looked at her, and how they refused to. At a fancy hotel in New York, Paltrow donned the fake weight. She spoke in particular about an experiment that she and the film’s makeup-effects designer had undertaken to test the suit’s credibility out in the world. In 2001, doing press for Shallow Hal, Gwyneth Paltrow spent a lot of time talking about the fat suit she wore to play Rosemary, the film’s romantic lead.
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