Jekyll and Hyde never had it so good. Nor did the wimpy bank clerk-turned-swaggering superstud Carrey created in The Mask.
Here the manic comic's partners in crime are his old pals the Farrelly Brothers, Bobby and Peter, who've previously disturbed the peace with in-your-face comedies like There's Something About Mary and the Jim Carrey- Jeff Daniels vehicle Dumb and Dumber, which grossed an astonishing $340 million worldwide. Intimates of the Farrelly oeuvre have come to expect some major outrage to go with their yocks, and the brothers are notoriously eager to comply. In Irene a barnyard chicken gets stuffed into the hairy butt of a cop. Charlie empties his pistol into a fallen cow at roadside. An albino psychopath named Whitey (Michael Bowman) says he murdered his entire family. A surly black midget with a genius IQ (Tony Cox) beds the hero's wife, who then gives birth to triplets. Let's not even get into the bodily function jokes -- or the business of the giant dildo.
Carrey and the Farrellys are equal-opportunity offenders, to be sure, but so far the only group to get its hackles up has been the National Alliance For the Mentally Ill, which has protested the movie's "gross ignorance and insensitivity to people with mental illnesses and their families." NAMI's main complaint is that Charlie/Hank is repeatedly called a "schizophrenic" or a "schizo." Actually schizophrenia is a severe, biologically based brain disorder the hallmarks of which are auditory hallucinations, or imagined "voices," and a variety of serious thinking and perceptual glitches. It's certainly no joke. And contrary to popular misconception, schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder. NAMI is understandably upset that another Hollywood movie is perpetuating that myth.
On the other hand, a Jim Carrey comedy is not exactly graduate school, and if the Farrelly Brothers feel like throwing elements of The Three Faces of Eve and The Nutty Professor into their comic pot, the most serious charge you can level against them is probably petty theft. Carrey has been compared to Jerry Lewis for years, and if "Hank" isn't a soul brother to Buddy Love, the narcissistic alter ego Lewis played in 1963's Professor, he's the closest thing to it -- right down to his contempt for Charlie's bashfulness. "Charlie's like origami," obnoxious Hank seethes. "He folds under pressure."
Jim Carrey never does. After his forays into more "serious" work like The Truman Show and the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, the Canadian-born dynamo looks perfectly at home in Irene as Charlie/Hank relieves himself on his rude neighbor's lawn or wheezes a little symphony through a broken nose. If there's nobility in sheer silliness, Carrey manages to tap into it -- even if the clinical diagnosis at the heart of the matter is utter nonsense. Meanwhile the Farrellys, who wrote this script back in 1990 with an old Rhode Island friend, Mike Cerrone, and codirected, also make way for Carrey's real-life lady love. As the feisty Irene, who's on the lam from thugs and crooked cops when she bumps into the ditzy state trooper, the petite Zellweger (who romanced Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire) gives off appealing sweetness and heart. She has some wiseass lines, too, but for the most part she's a welcome antidote to Carrey's relentless energies, which can be exhausting even for the audience.
OK, cards on the table: I admit to a weakness for Jim Carrey's most puerile high jinks and for the go-to-hell bad taste of the Farrelly Brothers, which is a hit-and-miss endeavor at best. Their brazen crudeness awakens the inner six-year-old in many of us -- like playing Chinese checkers once in a while or eating corn dogs at the drive-in. Those are not necessarily bad things unless there's no inner 30- or 46-year-old to carry the freight the rest of the time. Most grownups come equipped with that, of course; In the case of this actor and these moviemakers, the jury is certainly still out. So much the better.
