Film - Philip Kerr says it's fine to laugh at obesity if it makes people lose weight

Love-in-idleness. It's a herb, the juice of which, on sleeping eyelids laid, makes man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature seen. You can't buy it at the chemist's. This is the juice that Oberon uses in A Midsummer Night's Dream, dropping the liquor of it on Titania's eyes so that "The next thing then she waking looks upon -/Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,/On meddling monkey, or on busy ape -/She shall pursue it with the soul of love." Metaphorically speaking, it's also the stuff of the plot of the Farrelly (There's Something About Mary) Brothers' new comedy, Shallow Hal.

Hal Larsen (Jack Black) is the ultimate shallow guy who cares only how a woman looks, and not what kind of person she is. But trapped in an elevator with Tony Robbins, the self-help guru, Hal is treated to a free hypnosis session, after which he sees only the true inner beauty of women; so that the girls his friend Mauricio (Jason Alexander) dismisses as skanks seem, in Hal's juiced-up, love-blinded eyes, like the cutest-looking babes.

Enter Rosemary - or Gwyneth Paltrow, playing (with the aid of a fat-suit) a 300lb Peace Corps volunteer. Everyone who works for the Peace Corps, it would seem, is hugely fat, or boring, or a near-cretin with wooden teeth and appalling dandruff. To everyone except Hal, that is; and instead of Rosemary's enormous ass (a variation on Bottom's ass's head), Hal sees only Rosemary's kindness and humour. A highly calorific romance begins, with Hal wooing Rosemary as if she were, well, Gwyneth Paltrow, as opposed to, say, Roseanne Barr.

Now, according to the Farrellys, the premise of this story could easily have led to what they call a fat-joke movie. Nothing wrong with that, I say. I like fat jokes. Fat jokes have been entertaining us for centuries. How are we going to encourage fat people to lose weight if we don't laugh at them? But the Farrellys (so the film's publicity blurb tells me) were careful to avoid promoting any derogatory perceptions about fatsos. (Evidently, their alleged sensitivity did not extend to the Peace Corps.) All of which means that Shallow Hal ought to be judged as a failure on its own terms because, although this is actually a funny film, nearly all of the best jokes in it are fat jokes.

For example, Rosemary breaks not one but two chairs while eating in restaurants. She dives into a swimming pool and displaces several hundred gallons of water on to a barbecue, thereby extinguishing it, at the same time depositing a small boy in the branches of a tree. She also wears underwear the size of a small circus tent.

And then there's food.

You see, unlike most fat people, who are obviously victims of the PPARgamma2 gene that encourages the development of fat cells and says you're a fat bastard because God just wants you to be a fat bastard, Rosemary is fat because she eats too much - way too much. This is the cue for lots of fat jokes. Rosemary is the female equivalent of Desperate Dan. When someone offers her a slice of cake, she takes the whole cake. In restaurants, she orders as if she has a tapeworm. Rosemary is fat because she's out of control. In short, she's a typical American.

If you have travelled in the United States, you will know what I mean. There are hundreds of thousands of people walking around American shopping malls with legs and bums that strongly resemble the Wrong Trousers from Wallace and Gromit. It would seem that inside every turkey-bellied American there's a hugely obese one eating its way out, like an alien in the eponymous Ridley Scott movie. What is amazing about Rosemary in Shallow Hal is the idea that anyone in the US would notice her as being something out of the ordinary, in a nation of dedicated lard arses. It is only in Hollywood that Americans manage to stay thin; everywhere else in the United States, they look like Luciano Pavarotti and Jessye Norman.

The point of this intermittently hilarious movie is that it shouldn't matter what a person looks like. The only problem is that it does matter, as Hal himself discovers when Mauricio persuades Tony Robbins to remove the hypnotic suggestion. Hal doesn't even recognise Rosemary. He kisses the first grossly overweight woman he encounters - the domestic cleaner employed by Rosemary's mother. That takes love-blindness to a new level of absurdity. Consequently, the end of the film, reminiscent of Shrek, never really comes off.

In an effort to be politically correct about fat people, Shallow Hal makes the mistake of believing its own disingenuous PR. It might have been more honest if Robbins had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women. Lots of men do - especially in America, where they don't have a choice in the matter; or in Saudi Arabia, where it's impossible to tell if the nice Arab girl you're cosying up to is John Simpson, or someone even larger.

If Hal had been a chubby-hugger, instead of someone who thought he was making out with Gwyneth Paltrow, a natural order could, eventually, have been restored: Rosemary could have gone on the Ed Victor obvious diet (don't eat food), lost 150lb and given Hal a well-deserved surprise as a reward for his apparently good heart.

But here, normality is never properly restored, and Hal has to overcome his very obvious revulsion at the sight of Rosemary's leviathan body in order to ask her to marry him. It's the equivalent of Titania being told by Oberon that she's going to have to make out with a donkey.

As usual, Shakespeare did it better.

Shallow Hal (12) is on general release from 1 February

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