Shallow Hal Essay

Another person’s notes on Shallow Hal

After seeing ads for "Shallow Hal," several friends complained to me about what they saw as an offensive concept: If Hal (Jack Black) has been brainwashed to see only a woman's inner beauty, then why does that inner beauty have to look just like Gwyneth Paltrow?

Paltrow plays Rosemary, an obese woman in everyone's eyes but the spellbound Hal's; he sees the slender blond Paltrow that we're so used to seeing in movies and on magazine covers.

The answer to my friends' question is that those shots of the skinny Gwyneth are strictly from Hal's point of view; he is seeing what has been ingrained in him as the beauty ideal ever since his dying reverend father told him as a child, "Find yourself a classic beauty

Robbins, so oversized that Hal compares shaking his hands to "grabbing a bunch of bananas," responds by applying a magical grip to Hal's head, reprogramming him to see women's internal beauty as their external beauty.

Soon Hal is striking up great conversations and hitting the dance floor with attractive (to him), intelligent women for the first time in his life. He becomes even happier when he meets Rosemary (Paltrow), who works in a hospital children's ward and who assumes Hal is teasing her when he compliments her appearance.

Yes, Paltrow wears a fat suit in "Shallow Hal," but we don't really see her in it until late in the movie. Earlier we just catch small glimpses of the actual Rosemary -- an arm here, a leg there -- but otherwise view her from Hal's perspective.

Paltrow is more affecting as a 300-pound woman in a slender body, anyway. There's a genuine poignancy to the scenes when Hal assumes she has suitors left and right and we can see in her eyes how far from the truth he is. And when she breaks a chair by sitting on it, the moment is not ha-ha funny but bittersweet as we see how her embarrassment, and his interpretation of it, are two different