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| Released: |
1995 |
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| Genre: |
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Length: |
106 |
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Lloyd (Jim Carrey) is a limo driver who thinks Austria is where Paul Hogan comes from. Lloyd has the urbane dress sense and suave maturity of Gazza, the social skills of Mr Bean.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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He has a friend, Harry (Jeff Daniels), who is dumber. Together, they dream of setting up a pet shop which will specialise in the merchandising of worms. Their slogan is to be “I Got Worms”. In keeping with Lloyd’s dream of becoming the Donald Trump of the worm trade, he becomes infatuated with a rich, sophisticated blonde (Lauren Holly) who leaves a briefcase in an airport terminal, as a kidnap ransom. Lloyd intercepts the money and tries to return it, but she has already left for a ski-resort in Colorado. Lloyd and Harry chase after her - and the kidnappers chase after them, which is not exactly difficult since Harry’s van has been customised to look like a gigantic, shaggy dog, with its tongue hanging out. The bad guys try to menace our heroes by cutting the head off Harry’s parakeet, but Harry is so dumb he simply assumes the head has fallen off. Lloyd, being slightly quicker-witted as well as more entrepreneurial, sellotapes the bird’s head back on and sells it to an unsuspecting blind boy.
Actually, Dumb and Dumber isn’t dumb at all. It’s a highly intelligent movie about deeply stupid people. I cried with laughter - not once, but frequently. Dumb and Dumber is funnier than Jim Carrey’s previous success, The Mask, and much funnier than his breakthrough movie, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. It is, of course, in appalling taste. If you sat stony-faced through The Producers and Airplane! this film is not for you. A few of my more serious-minded colleagues left the press screening in a state of shock, muttering words like “awful”, “downmarket” and “regrettably puerile”.
On the other hand, the movie has made over 117 million dollars in the States.
The secret of its success? First, it is performed with a kind of manic genius. Jeff Daniels, shaggy and flabby but with his usual razor-sharp timing, is an excellent stooge for Carrey, an even more inspired physical comedian than his most obvious influences, Jerry Lewis, Steve Martin and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. There are moments when Carrey seems able to defy the laws of physics and turn into a cartoon version of himself - all without the aid of the special effects which made The Mask a hit.
The screenplay is an inventive, well sustained satire on current trends in nerdishness. Some of the funniest sequences are fantasies in which Lloyd dreams of How To Impress People. The low humour comes from his wild physical antics; the high comedy comes - as in Wodehouse’s classic Bertie Wooster stories - from the discrepancy between his lofty self-image and the much lowlier reality.
Dumb and Dumber captures better than any earnest feature article the crisis of Nineties Masculinity. The young men on display are utterly useless - incapable of earning their keep, coping with mature (or immature) relationships, or living in conditions other than tasteless squalor. But this is not merely a product of their own dumbness; their lack of intellectual life merely leaves them slightly more cruelly exposed than the average to a dumb and dumbing culture.
Most Hollywood movies of this period - like Forrest Gump, Nell and IQ - argued that if you strip away the veneer of civilisation and intellect,we are honest, kind and decent. Dumb and Dumber takes a less sentimental, more realistic view - that people are driven as much by their baser needs and appetites.
But director-writer Peter Farrelly and his co-writers Bennett Yellin and Bobby Farrelly are never mean-spirited. Even when their comedy descends to the crude and lavatorial, they retain the boisterous good humour of the Carry On movies.
Dumb and Dumber neatly avoids the more voguish, gang mentality of Wayne’s World. The heroes here are not only losers, but loners. There is an innocence in their blokish block-headedness, a courage in their rank bad taste, a heroism in their groundless optimism.
It is a celebration - ironic, but sincere - of freedom: freedom from authority, convention and political correctness. Who knows? Maybe it will eventually come to be recognized as some kind of dumb landmark, the Easy Rider of the 1990s.
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, Harry ........... Jeff Daniels 