“I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” (Dennis Dugan, 2007)
Available on iTunes; on Amazon Video; on Microsoft; on DVD.
There is a tendency among
nominal liberal and progressive moviegoers to attend the explicit art-house
political saga, and evade the ribald comedies obviously aimed at much broader,
less discerning sectors of the population. It’s exactly the constituency that
the Weinstein Company often depends on, as well as the one that had, until
recently, provided the bulk of outside support to the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. The misguided refinement and unconsciousness
prejudices of this interest group explain why one sees enthusiastic acclaim go
to such disobligingly cautious works as The Imitation Game and Dallas
Buyers Club, and little worthy recognition be afforded the sharper, more
revealing, more personal, more daring — and, yes, more popular and entertaining
— works of Judd Apatow and Eddie Murphy. The predominant disagreeable factor of
the bulk of these recent outright liberal movies is that they reflect the views
and verities of the liberal media establishment back upon itself with little of
the insight or tension that leads to true art; the comforting platitudes and
affirmations of these movies are generally yoked to a similarly complacent and
unchallenging aesthetic. They expand the echo chamber shared by their well-meaning filmmakers and audiences, and do little to advance the political
causes they’ve ostensibly taken up, or to influence the culture into
which they’re released.
Into this palliative division of
the cinema, the drop of something effervescent like Dennis Dugan’s 2007 bawdy
entertainment I Now Pronounce You Chuck
and Larry, which this week crossed the 10th anniversary of its
theatrical release, is most welcome. No doubt a number of readers groaned at
the sight of Adam Sandler in a movie recommendation by this blog, and the rest
were disconcerted by the raucous bulk of his frequent comedy partner Kevin James. The film
is popular enough to have been seen by most of this blog’s readers already, but
those who haven’t, despite what you may have heard or previously experienced by
way of Sandler’s Brooklyn-bro vulgarity, are heartily encouraged to indulge its
frank sentimentality and ultimate moral message of homophilia, which it couples
with a warm and heartfelt tone of sincerity and political activism. It’s not in quite the same aesthetic class as the films of Judd Apatow (though, frankly, few films of
this century are) but it brings a forthright approach to satirising and
transforming mainstream perceptions of the homosexual community it depicts. In
that it delves into the personal lives of its characters and portrays private
impulses and desires that don’t conform neatly to a conventional political cause — thus illustrating how politics are necessarily driven by the chaotic,
multivalent individual lives they affect — it’s superior to the abovementioned issue-oriented
films of overtly liberal politics. What’s more, at the time of its release, it
was deliberately aimed at precisely the moviegoing market that generally had
little interest in or exposure to LGBTQ causes, and did considerable more work
in reaching out to a broader, more intersected group for support and empathy.