Say It Isn't So

Produced by the Farrelly Brothers, this gross-out love story is their lamest comedy yet. The main characters - butter-fingered small town hairdresser Jo, amiable, dreamy Animal Control worker Gilly - are conceived as innocents, the first a breezy survivor, the latter a stoic fatalist. As played by Graham and Klein, they'd make a sufficiently interesting and sympathetic odd couple for a left-field romance, but prove unsuitable stock as recipients of bad taste satire's pratfalls and humiliations. As in There's Something About Mary, a detective provides the McGuffin. Having fallen in love and accustomed himself to Jo's hardly ideal family - Sally Field excelling with full-on white trash philistinism as mum Valdine; Jenkins more repetitive as the disabled grump of a father - orphan Gilly is told Valdine is his long lost mother, Jo his sister. Cue comedy of social stigmatisation. End of Act One. Act Two sees Jo disappear to Oregon to marry a millionaire and the film disappear up its own rear end. Poor timing and muffed set pieces are compounded by implausibility and inconsequence.