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This wife comes with a health warning

Norbit, a raucous, sloppy comedy directed by Brian Robbins, is primarily a showcase for the talents of its star, Eddie Murphy (also credited as a producer and a screenwriter), and Rick Baker, who was in charge of "special makeup effects." Murphy's polymorphous sketch-comedy chops have previously been enhanced by Baker's mastery of fat-suit and latex-mask techniques in the two Nutty Professor movies. In this film the makeup, along with editing tricks and visual effects, allow Murphy to play three different characters.

Each is a bit of a stereotype. Norbit Rice, a role for which Murphy puts on thick glasses and affects a voice that sounds like a variation on the Bill Cosby impression he used to do, is a henpecked nebbish. His wife, Rasputia — the best movie-character name since Bezu Fache, the French detective in The Da Vinci Code, by the way — is an ill-tempered giantess, a monstrous variation on Madea, the plus-size matriarch incarnated by Tyler Perry in Diary of a Mad Black Woman and its sequel.

Stuck in a loveless marriage? As Eddie Murphy shows in Norbit, it could be worse. PHOTOS COURTESY OF UIP

To play Rasputia, Murphy appears to have been encased in foam rubber and dressed in Dolce & Gabbana for Elephants. It is when Rasputia goes out in a bikini (and, later, for a bikini wax) that the full extent of Baker's virtuosity becomes evident.

There were some big-boned people in the audience at the screening I attended, and also some nerds with glasses (one, anyway), and none of them seemed too offended by Rasputia or her husband. Wong (also Murphy), the Chinese man whose restaurant doubles as an orphanage, may not go over so well, though there is some evidence to suggest that ethnic dialect humor is creeping back into respectability under the sign of "irony." "You ugry brack baby!" Wong exclaims when he finds the infant Norbit in his driveway.

Film Notes: Norbit Directedby: Brian Robbins Starring: Eddie Murphy (Norbit/Rasputia/Mr. Wong), Thandie Newton (Kate), Eddie Griffin (Pope Sweet Jesus), Terry Crews (Big Jack), Clifton Powell (Earl), Katt Williams (Lord Have Mercy), Lester (Rasta) Speight (Blue), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Deion Hughes), Marlon Wayans (Buster). Running time: 97 minutes Taiwan release: today

Not exactly uproarious. But Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on Saturday Night Live, has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive. He is less like his fellow SNL-cast-members-turned-movie-stars, who mostly sustain a consistent persona underneath whatever costume they are wearing, than like Peter Sellers, who could burrow alarmingly deep even when playing broad, easy roles. And so Murphy takes Wong a few steps beyond simple mockery.

He also endows Rasputia, in spite of her habit of throwing Norbit through walls, her flatulence and her handy, tiresome catchphrase ("How you doin'?"), with an odd kind of delicacy. Her violent meanness is compounded by vanity, an unshakable sense of her own divine femininity that shows itself in the way she rolls her eyes, tilts her head and flutters her enormous, exquisitely manicured hands. Rasputia is certainly hateful, but some of her self-love manages to rub off on the audience.

That she is impervious to humiliation makes the humor in Norbit less cruel than it might have been. The script, which Murphy wrote with his brother Charles and the team of Jay Scherick and David Ronn, cobbles together a ramshackle plot that leaves room for other comic actors to indulge in some low-fat shtick. Marlon Wayans is an ambitious aerobic dance instructor who cuckolds Norbit, while Eddie Griffin and Katt Williams are a pair of good-natured, semi-retired pimps. Hollywood sure does love pimps, by the way. Why is that, I wonder.

But pimps, funny-talking Asians and fat ladies crashing through walls do not a movie make. Or maybe they do, especially if you throw in a talking dog, which this movie does. In any case, tradition dictates that there must also be a pretty, skinny woman (Thandie Newton) and, um, another guy (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Newton is Kate, Norbit's childhood sweetheart, and Gooding is her fiance, Deion, a smooth-talking charmer quickly revealed to be a heartless phony.

Norbit himself is sweet, odd and beleaguered, and one of the movie's most ingenious touches is the discrepancy between his sunny, forgiving view of the world (conveyed in voice-over narration) and the horrific reality of his married life. Not only must he endure Rasputia's domestic tyranny; he also works for her three nasty brothers, who dominate the town through their construction and extortion business.

Robbins' direction is adequate. He doesn't mess up the story — it was a mess to begin with — but too many of the gags are lumbering and graceless, more fun to anticipate than to witness. What will happen when Rasputia goes down an amusement park water slide? She'll crash through a wall. What will she do when she's mad at Norbit? Throw him through a window.

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