I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
Directed by: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel, Steve Buscemi
Rated: PG-13 for crude sexual content throughout, nudity, language and drug references. (re-rated; originally rated R)
Parental Notes: This is a difficult film to offer advice about for parents. It’s thoroughly crude and has more than its fair share of stupid stereotypes, but it lacks graphic violence or sexual content. Whether you’re comfortable with your kids seeing it will probably depend heavily on your opinion of stupid comedies and homosexuality.
“I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” is a very frustrating film, on a number of levels. It’s not quite as bad as the trailers would indicate, but that’s kind of like saying a lone dead fish doesn’t smell quite as bad as a trash dump. It’s tempting to praise it for not being offensive and filled to the brim with homophobia, but then I would have to praise a film which has a more thorough helping of gay stereotyping than I would usually tolerate.
The story is simple. Firefighters Larry Valentine (Kevin James) and Chuck Levine (Adam Sandler) are best friends. When Larry discovers that he’s missed the deadline to make his children his pension beneficiaries now that his wife has died, he nearly gives up — until he finds out that if he gets married, he can make his new spouse the beneficiary. That would leave the kids with someone to look after them and enough money to do so. The question is, who to marry? Obviously, he settles on Chuck. His friend balks at first — he’s a serious womanizer — but Larry assures him that it will only be on paper, so he agrees. Of course, if the whole thing stayed secret, we wouldn’t have much of a movie, so word gets out and soon the two super-straight guys have to fake their gay marriage well enough to convince the city investigator, Clinton Fitzer (Steve Buscemi).
“Chuck and Larry” is full of stereotypes. There’s the anonymous Japanese fellow who performs their ceremony (Rob Schneider), complete with mispronunciations and frequent “hai!”s and bows. There’s the two gay secondary characters, who are incredibly effeminate. Then there’s Chuck and Larry themselves, who are basically nice guys but as stereotypically hetero as you can be — Chuck is able to seduce any woman and Larry is still very much in love with his dead wife and is a terrible housekeeper. This sort of stupid comedy generally has loads of stereotypes, but they become tiresome very quickly because stereotypical characters are so incredibly predictable.
The other thing this sort of stupid comedy often has in spades is wish-fulfillment, and “Chuck and Larry” has plenty of that. There’s the obligatory scene where the hot woman who thinks the guys are really gay offers to let Chuck feel her breasts to prove they’re real. There are also a couple of scenes where Chuck and Larry put the smackdown on gaybashers, which is a lot of fun for anybody who’s ever fantasized about that.
Still, there is a strong undercurrent of “ew, two guys in love? Gross!” We never see James and Sandler kiss, although there are two scenes where they come close and both are played as gross-out style comedy. Every gay character shown on screen is a flaming queer. Even Duncan (Ving Rhames), a firefighter so manly that he threw his captain through a wall at another station and is widely suspected of being an axe murderer, becomes a limp-wristed, singing-in-the-shower, high-voiced stereotype as soon as he comes out of the closet.
Ultimately, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” is neither all good nor all bad, neither incredibly offensive nor decently sensitive. It’s just as stupid as the previews would have you believe, but the filmmakers have gone out of their way to include as strong a “gay is okay!” message as they could without coming close to alienating their straight male audience. This film is not at all revolutionary or challenging to the mainstream viewer, but it might be a teensy step in the right direction — if only because the main characters remind us that “‘gay’ is the accepted vernacular” rather than the f-word beloved of gaybashers.