It's probably fitting that portions of the new Farrelly Brothers' chewy but minor comedy, Stuck on You, are set during the winter in a resort town -- Martha's Vineyard -- like their first picture out of the toboggan chute, Dumb and Dumber. Both movies seem to come out of a taste-free zone partially inspired by Rankin/Bass, the animation studio responsible for the holiday stop-motion, self-pity classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Bobby and Peter Farrelly's creations -- this time it's the conjoined 32-year-old twins Bob and Walt Tenor -- reside happily in a landscape like the Island of Misfit Toys. For the Tenor boys, it's the small town where they run a thriving diner, Quickee Burger, in which they guarantee to get the food to the table in three minutes, no matter how big the order.
With Stuck on You, which opens nationwide today, the Farrelly Brothers have a big, steaming order to deliver. They must compete with the legacy of their own bad taste, for which they compensate with a quality that some may find even more repellent -- sentimentality. It's a much funnier movie than the trailer would lead you to believe; it would almost have to be. But it is just not as consistent as their previous trash wallows.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX
Bob (Matt Damon) and Walt (Greg Kinnear) are country mouse and city mouse who are actually joined at the hip; the directors bring the double-sided motif closer together than ever before. Bob is happy slinging burgers, while Walt aspires to be an actor -- a successful one, that is. He's already the biggest thing in their hometown, where he stars as Truman Capote in the one-man show "Tru."
Some of the funniest stuff in the movie involves the comparison of Robert Morse's version to Walt's. It's a little more amusing than Bob's having a panic attack at the prospect of having to be onstage, though badly hidden, with his brother. Yet Walt is the kind of ambitious comet who might be played by Morse -- he's an audacious operator who's gifted at charming everyone.
While Walt succeeds without really trying, Bob hides under his bangs and maintains an e-mail relationship with a girl he's been writing to for three years but hasn't met. When Walt decides it's time for the brothers to move to Hollywood -- "I think I got the chops," he says of his motivation, an utterly absurd situation that's treated seriously -- he convinces his younger brother by saying it's a chance for Bob to see his Internet honey, May Fong (Wen Yann Shih), in person.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX
Walt has less of their liver than Bob -- it's how the movie explains why a separation surgery would be risky, since there's only a 50-50 chance that Walt would survive. (It's also the excuse for Walt looking older; Kinnear is seven years Damon's senior, but that doesn't explain why he seems to be wearing Jeff Daniels's hair from Dumb and Dumber.)
But after 32 years the Tenors have become a marvelously functioning machine by necessity and because of affection. (We get a flashback of their athletic achievements that includes a cameo by the Dolphins running back Ricky Williams as their high school football coach.)
Walt's gargantuan optimism gives the movie a soul; it needs one since it barely has a look. The scenes set in the Hollywood residential hotel where they live look even faker than Walt's hair. On the other hand, the twins' relocation to Los Angeles gives the Farrellys a chance for the most glamorous shot of their careers, a camera move that starts with a palm-frond-view of Hollywood Boulevard and descends to the street.
For the unshakable Tenors, this is their arrival in dreamland -- they're oblivious to the sleaze -- and it's highlighted by another Capote reference: Andy Williams's swoony warbling of Moon River, from Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Other equally corny songs mixed in are a Dolby-in-selected-theaters version of Moonlight Feels Right, as well as Wild Horses and, as the boys work their grill, Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire.)
The twins' curvy, swerve-on neighbor April (Eva Mendes, charming though she didn't need to lose so much weight for the part) vibes with Walt's conquering attitude, even though she's a few lumens short of a porchlight. And he gets an agent, Morty O'Reilly (Seymour Cassel), who's so out-of-touch that he probably thinks the Happy Days episodes on Nick at Nite are first-run; his eyeglass frames are big enough to carry those shows.
Walt's dynamism leads to a run-in with Cher (as herself), who wants to use him -- that is, them -- to get out of a network TV commitment. In order to sabotage the deal she hires Walt as a co-star to play her partner in a crime-stopper series, which also seems to have been lifted from the same 1970s era that Morty is stuck in.
Walt plays a wise-cracking police scientist and Cher is a tough-talking lawyer, sporting Solid Gold dancer ensembles similar to the outfits she wore in 1987's Suspect, where she really did star as a lawyer. (She earns a good sport award here, to go with her Oscar.)
The Farrellys, working with the writers Charles Wessler and Bennett Yellin, are at their best when they pair the movie's optimism with opportunism. The directors gleefully sink to wielding the producing studio, Fox, as de facto product placement, along with several other back-shelf products that you may have forgotten about.
And there is a last cameo that returns a performer who also has forgotten roots -- in musical theater -- to the stage for the big finale. The one thing that connects all of the Farrellys' movies is inclusion, and eventually -- some might cringe and say inevitably -- Stuck on You does so as well. The story of the Tenors finally alights on a passage that could be from The Wizard of Oz -- there's no place like home.
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