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I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
Directed by Dennis Dugan
Written by Alexander Paine and Jim Taylor
Starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Jessica Biel
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It's stupid, crude, clumsily written, often idiotic, and frequently charmless. Aside from that, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is a pretty good movie. Put in the context of Adam Sandler's oeuvre, it's not as well made as Big Daddy or The Wedding Singer, or as smart as 50 First Dates, Little Nicky, or Punch Drunk Love. The coarseness and frat-boy humor here is closer to the gross antics of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison -- which, although dismissed as stupid teenage-boy movies, actually hearken back to the fully realized, uniquely 19th-century ribald American humor of Mark Twain and Eugene Field, if without these predecessors' larger vision.

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I>I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is based on such a false, flimsy premise as to be nonsensical. Larry Valentine (Kevin James) is a pudgy, sweet-tempered, widowed Brooklyn firefighter so grief-stricken by his wife's death that he forgets to fill out forms leaving his pension to his children. The only way to fix the snafu, he's informed, is to remarry. Chuck Levine (Adam Sandler), Larry's best friend and coworker, comes to the rescue. Larry convinces Chuck to sign up as his same-sex domestic partner. Thus, in the event of Larry's death, Chuck will get the pension and also custody of his two children.

Okay, this isn't even close to how pensions work, and while Chuck's a nice guy, he thinks about nothing but scoring chicks and getting laid, so he's not a likely first choice for a gay domestic-partner-of-convenience with childcare duties. The plot's structure is so dubious that you'd never guess that two of the scriptwriters, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, are responsible for such smart films as Election, Citizen Ruth, Sideways, and About Schmidt.

But I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry isn't really about the plot -- its main concern is homosexual panic, both in the lives of its characters as well as the sensibilities of its audience. We are led to relate to and mimic the anxiety of the film's characters -- most of whom, including Chuck and Larry, are appalled by the idea of sex or love between two men -- while simultaneously getting told by the filmmakers that this is the wrong response.

Director Dennis Dugan heightens the cognitive dissonance by continually placing Chuck and Larry in circumstances where they have to be gayer. Once they are domestic partners they become the target of Clinton Fitzer (Steve Buscemi), a crazed pension-board investigator who is certain that the duo are not gay, a claim which impels them to get married in Canada. Then Alex McDonough (Jessica Biel), their lawyer, urges them to become more and more public with their relationship in order to thwart the doubters.

In tandem with these developments, Chuck and Larry begin facing lots of overt homophobia. Right-wing Christians picket a big gay Halloween party they attend. Parents at the school where Larry's kids go bar him from class trips. The couple's "brothers" at the firehouse now refuse to shower with them. Of course Chuck and Larry -- never having faced this sort of prejudice before -- are appalled and fight back, all the while reaffirming that they are gay, and thus getting ever deeper into their lie. This is classic 1930s screwball comic set-up, similar to the 1937 Nothing Sacred or 1938 Bringing Up Baby (both of which are infinitely better than this film). But the twist here is that viewers are continually implicated in Chuck and Larry's political agenda.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is similar to those earliest Sandler films, such as Billy Madison or Big Daddy, in which the Sandler characters have to grow-up, become "real" men. Here Sandler learns that friendship is stronger than casual hookups and that being gay is not gross, that it's just as good as being heterosexual. In this sense the film has a Hollywood liberal agenda. But with almost all of the film's laughs predicated on gay gross-out humor, that agenda is compromised. Were the writing and directing better, much could be forgiven: as it is, dropping-the-soap-in-the-shower jokes only go so far. There are some well wrought moments (like how everyone presumes that Sandler is the bottom in the relationship) and nicely handled scenes (such as at that Halloween party, where Larry comes dressed as a giant apple and Chuck as a gay vampire looking alarmingly like an aging Al Pacino). But all too often there's merely a retreat into cheap jokes.

The basic problem is that the film doesn't know its audience. The usual teen-boy Sandler fans are expecting tits-and-ass jokes, and will probably like the soap-in-the-shower routines well enough. But director Dugan also tries to meld together the feel-good sentiment of Big Daddy (which he directed) with the low-down humor of, for instance, really fat men farting as they are carried out of a burning building. The two impulses clash. There are some sweet moments -- Larry's children testifying in court, fellow-firefighter Duncan (Ving Rhames) coming out -- but they don't carry the movie.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry wants to be (and mostly is) a pro-gay film, but its frat-boy humor narrows its vision. At the end of the film, during the big pension hearing, Chuck and Larry were supposed to kiss to prove they were a couple. That scene was filmed, but then ditched in the final cut, so that now the movie ends with them not kissing, but being interrupted by their superior, Captain Tucker (Dan Ackroyd), who explains that they are not a couple, but that Larry still deserves to have benefits. The official reason given by the producers for the cut is that a same-sex kiss would have automatically given the film an R rating. While this may be true, it's also clear that some in the audience would have been unsettled, making for them I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry a real gross-out movie.

While Chuck and Larry wants to do the right thing, it just can't bring itself to follow through. The tagline for the film is "How far would you go for a friend?" I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry will go far enough to please some of the audience, but not far enough to sustain its own modest aims.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com