FilmBlather.com

"I'm your brother! Marry me!"

The Farrely Brothers are a national treasure in their own right, two of the only working filmmakers who can strike the right balance between bad taste and good humor. Say It Isn't So was directed by James B. Rodgers, reportedly one of the Farrelys' proteges, could have used a few more lessons in their art. The movie tries for gross-out laughs but can't tell the difference between comedy and embarrassment which forces it into an uphill battle it's never able to win.

The story has almost infinite comedic promise; even the trailer, usually serving as the first bad omen for a hopeless movie, made it look decent. Gilly Noble (Chris Klein), a poor, slightly slow young man working at an animal shelter, falls for Jo Wingfield (Heather Graham), the beautiful daughter of a hillbilly mother (Sally Field) and a wheelchair-bound father (Richard Jenkins). But then it turns out that the orphaned Gilly is -- horror of horrors! -- Jo's brother. Shocked and forlorn, the two of them decide they can never see each other again, and Jo moves to California.

Jo's parents couldn't be happier about this. They don't want their daughter to marry some poor animal shelter worker. They want her, in her infinite beauty, to hitch to some obscenely rich guy, and are willing to sacrifice her happiness for it. The rich guy, of course, is a total jerk, because all rich guys in movies like these have to be jerks. So, when Jo's real brother shows up, they do the best they can to keep Jo from knowing that Gilly's not her brother, and to keep Gilly as far away from her as possible.

The movie puts its characters through one tribulation after another and wants us to vascillate between laughing at them and feeling sorry for them. You can't do comedy that way; or, more accurately, you can do it that way but it won't work. Consider a scene where Gilly parades around a town with his hand stuck up a cow's behind. The scene is too predictable, unmotivated and cartoonish to have actual shock value, and shock value would have been the only thing going for it. Another scene, where one woman's shavings are another man's fake beard is just plain disgusting. Crossing the line isn't an end in itself; it should serve the plot and the comedy, not vice-versa.

Chris Klein is a wonderful actor, but like fellow American Pie cast member Jason Biggs, he is in serious danger of being perpetually typecast. Actors too often decide to stick to what works instead of taking risks that would, for better or worse, expand their range as a performer. Chris Klein hasn't yet starred in any movies that aren't geared towards teens (with the possible exception of Election, though that, too, was set in a high-school). Happily, he has a role in the upcoming war drama We Were Soldiers Once... and Young.

If it seems like I'm avoiding discussing Klein's performance in Say It Isn't So, I am, because I'm at a loss. It's not bad in any recognizable way, but neither is it particularly good; I've seen better from him in the past and will, I'm sure, see better in the future. It's a bad sign, I guess, when I'm more interested in discussing other movies than the one I'm reviewing.