Stuck on You
With Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Eva Mendes, Wen Yann Shih, Cher, Seymour Cassel, Griffin Dunne, and Meryl Streep.
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The reason isn’t the bad taste or the lowbrow high jinks, both of which are found in abundance in other cultures. It’s the sleight of hand–or sleight of mind–that simultaneously ignores and embraces, denies and seizes upon the condition of being Siamese twins. This sleight of mind–now you think it, now you don’t–becomes a kind of ideological fan dance that makes viewers feel extremely open-minded even though they haven’t been challenged. Some ads for the movie prompt the same response. “Outrageous comedy and a lot of heart are joined at the hip in Stuck on You,” says one–grotesquely mixing metaphors–while pictures show the lovable brothers playfully placing their fists knuckle to knuckle; the caption reads “Brothers Stick Together,” but their hips aren’t shown, as if to say, too explicit isn’t funny.
Their characters are a quarrelsome yet generous pair who get in each other’s way while trying to help each other out but also work smashingly well as a team. Class differences seem to matter a lot more in this movie than physiological differences–a distinction that’s hardly new to the Farrelly brothers. Bo and Walt run a burger joint in Martha’s Vineyard that employs a mentally challenged waiter who speaks with a stutter (played by someone with this disability), and the brothers pride themselves on how quickly they can fill orders and how gracefully they eject an irate couple who regard the staff as freaks.
Once the twins decide to risk a dangerous operation separating them, permitting Bo to return to Martha’s Vineyard and the burger joint while Walt remains in Hollywood, the psychological bond that ultimately brings them back together becomes central to the story, and the class issues that have come between them are dropped. Most improbable of all, the twins wind up in the best of all possible worlds: back at the burger joint consorting with just plain folks. And when Walt realizes his dream of staging and starring in a local musical based on Bonnie and Clyde, Cher and Streep are converted into just plain folks too, Cher turning up in the audience to cheer him on, Streep gamely serving as his costar. (Significantly, neither actress is seen at the burger joint, but the disabled waiter working there is in the stage musical, which may be just as good at leveling the playing field.) As a surefire closer, the musical is allowed to take over the movie, supplanting all the unresolved class issues it has been cheerfully denying all along. This too has a particular kind of contemporary relevance if we think about Enron being overtaken by Afghanistan, Afghanistan being overtaken by Iraq, and good intentions regarding both countries being overtaken by ignorance and confusion. When in doubt, change the subject.
