Rating:

Two guys pretend to be married in order to obtain the same civil rights and employment benefits which are enjoyed by married heterosexual couples all over America. That’s the plotline of the newest Adam Sandler vehicle, despite the fact that 75% of Americans can’t relate to it, because homosexual couples have no rights where they’re from.

Surprisingly, the film goes much deeper than expected. But is it funny?

We have two heroes. Larry (Kevin James) is a widower and a father of two, still mourning his wife’s death two years after the fact. Chuck (Adam Sandler) is his womanizing, calendar-modeling best friend.

Their relationship is well-displayed as strong and intimate, as they rush into burning buildings together and consistently watch out for each other’s safety. These heroics take a scary turn, however, as the two are hospitalized after Larry saves Chuck from a second-story fall in a warehouse.

The hospitalization gets Larry thinking about his pension plan, and what might happen to his kids if he died. His benefits are still listed to go to his deceased wife, and so he attempts to transfer the coverage to his children—only to be told that he had a year to name a new beneficiary after his wife’s death.

Two years after the fact, he knows that he’s missed his window. The only way to name a new beneficiary, he’s told, is to get married again.

And there you have both the inciting incident and the story’s main theme (if you can have a legitimate theme in a scattershot-film such as this one). More than being about gay marriage, this film tries to concern itself with the personal journey of Larry, unable to get over the loss of his wife but desperately needing to do so.

So attached is he to the memory of his wife that the idea of re-marrying is more appalling than pretending to be gay and marrying his best friend—and thereby defrauding the government.

The movie makes no allowances for this, either. Even as they try to fool the authorities, the implication is clear: gay marriage is a prickly issue, from simply a legal position, because it could be (and has been) the case that some crafty “buddies” could claim to be married and reap the potential tax benefits.

Of course, two of my friends from high school did the same thing in their freshmen year of college, and they’re male/female. Food for thought.

After they initially marry, we’re privy to several instances displaying why Chuck and Larry are latently homophobic, as well as scene after redundant scene of the same interaction with other characters, which basically went like this:

Person encountered: You guys are gay, right?

Chuck: Oh yeah, I [insert something stereotypically gay here] all the time.

Larry: I love [gay stereotype] a lot.

This happens probably ten times, which not only gets monumentally boring, but results in the exemplification and reinforcement of nearly every gay stereotype in the book.

Of course, in the middle of the second act, they start to experience all the discrimination and outright bigotry that homosexuals experience, and they learn personally how it feels to be judged for something other than who you are as a person. Thus, the mending of the ways begins.

Now, I went into this film expecting it to be preachy. In fact, I was looking forward to it. I wanted to see what a summer popcorn comedy had to say about a serious and divisive social issue. Even so, it surprised me how much they comprehended the issue at hand, and how obviously they suggested which side of the issue was the “correct” side—something entertainment (and art) generally avoids.

They learn that denying people rights never solves any of the alleged issues with their existence, love and symbolic devotion strengthens and stabilizes lifestyles, all that stuff.

The main flaw of the film—outside of lapsing into an infinite comedic circuit—is that it follows an extremely familiar path (particularly for Sandler), but executes it poorly. It begins with a man, who has an idea about his life, and that idea needs to change. He gets into a situation that he doesn’t like, but has to do for external reasons. Along the way, he meets a woman, they fall in love, and he realizes the thing he never wanted was exactly what he needed. Then everyone is the better for it.

Think of this movie as a Happy Gilmore where playing golf is replaced with being gay.

The problem is that the familiar story we see isn’t the path of one man. Larry, with the dead wife who can’t move on, is the one whose life needs changing. But Chuck is the one with the romantic interest. Larry is the one who is forced into pretending to be gay, but Chuck is the one who ultimately learns from the experience—his discrimination replaced with a newfound respect and desire for commitment.

You end up feeling like you wasted your time on Chuck and bad for Larry because nothing really changed for him. There’s a moment near the end when it’s suggested that he’s “okay” now, but you don’t feel that it’s justified.

So it’s a redundant comedy with a formulaic plotline. We knew that the minute the “Happy Madison Productions” logo appeared on the screen. But what we didn’t know was the level to which they would take their examination of gay couple hood, and its relationship to society. Turns out, predictable as it was, that was the one satisfying part of the movie—it was a well-developed happy ending, with a legitimate argument for the sanctity of not just marriage, but love.

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