The Movie Nut

"I Now Pronounce You
Chuck and Larry"
Directed by: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin
James, Jessica Biel
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for crude
language, sexual innuendo, nu
dity and drug references)
Running time: 110 minutes
Best suited for: the utterly un
PC
Least suited for: the
unapologetically PC

Once again, Hollywood sets up to score in a significant way, and once again Hollywood fumbles the ball on the 1-yard line. Does this one recover? Well, more about that particular incident in a moment.

Widower and heterosexual firefighter Larry Valentine (Kevin James) discovers he's run out of pension options to support his two young children. Larry finds a loophole in the system, so he asks his lifelong firefighting buddy Chuck (Adam Sandler) to "pretend" to be his domestic partner, just long enough for the ink to dry.

Larry's saved Chuck's life recently, so the crazed, womanizing Chuck reluctantly agrees to return the favor, although the only thing popping out of Chuck's closets are women in tight cheerleading outfits.

That's the setup in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry." It's not a plot device new to Hollywood: Men pretending to be women ("Some Like It Hot," "Tootsie," "Mrs. Doubtfire") have been around forever. We've even had a few women pretending to be men ("Victor/Victoria," "Shakespeare in Love"), whites pretending to be AfricanAmerican ("Black Like Me") and even black males pretending to be white women ("White Chicks"), so it was only a matter of time for mainstream to get socially witty and pretty and gay. In America, perhaps, you know you've almost made it out of the social substratum when Hollywood actually charges people to poke fun at you.

To be fair, nobody really minds much when hetero white male European Protestant type guys poke fun at themselves, and I guess there's a lesson there as well.

This typical Adam Sandler flick is pretty good in an "I hope nobody I know sees me in this theater" sort of way. If you can get past the juvenile stereotyping- not only of gays, mind you, but also of Asians, the overweight, women in general- you may really like this one. Or at least chuckle out your money's worth. "Chuck and Larry" is more evenhanded than "Borat." Funnier, too.

For a while, they pretend to play house, even attempting to sleep in the same bed. Then bureaucracy, in the guise of Clinton Fitzer (a sneering Steve Buscemi), rears its ugly head and starts snooping into the duo's domestic bliss. The state's looking for fraud, someone to throw the book at, someone to send to jail for a long time.

So Chuck and Larry hire a defense attorney (Jessica Biel). Of course Chuck's smitten, making his pretense with Larry more unstable.

The pandemonium escalates, in the kind of goofy, unrealistic way things do in movie sit-coms. To throw off suspicion, Chuck and Larry get hitched in Canada (because, of course, they can't do so in the Land of the Free). Their firefighting buddies shun them (which is so '60s), and their relationship ends up in a very public hearing.

About halfway through the film, the giggles subside a bit, because of course it's time for the morality lesson, about how we're all the same underneath, and who really cares what happens when the lights go out next door, and homosexuals are people too (not to mention that gays throw much better costume parties than straighties)- so, overall, "Chuck and Larry" is really a pretty harmless, morality-tinged effort.

But then comes The Moment, the time when, to prove their love, in front of 100-odd friends and strangers, Fitzer demands that Chuck and Larry kiss to show their affection. These are two guys who've been best friends forever, who've saved each others lives, who shower naked together down at the station, who play basketball together, sharing all sorts of sweaty slop, who've tossed harmless "I love you, man!" comments back and forth for eons.

In my opinion, here's where Hollywood could have hit it out of the ballpark. Where movie magic could have eased a whole bunch of people into a slightly less homophobic realm. Where studio liberalism could have raised society's bar a tad.

And now for the first spoiler I've ever intentionally written: They don't kiss. The moment is stopped. (And not because Chuck and Larry aren't game at that point, but still, alas, the moment is stopped.) These two lifelong best friends remain pure and sacrosanct and, somehow, for me the movie just dies right there. Yeah, it's still funny; there's still that gotta-have, everybody's happy, boffo ending. But the time was right. The conditions were right. America might have been waiting. . . .

So just realize this, you cultureshifting, Armani-suit-wearing, slightly downSouth big movie execs, every once in awhile just go for it. Make that difficult, socially significant decision. Dare to deliver. You never know, we might just be okay with it.