“Dumb and Dumber To” is a film of ideas, though that is not intended as a charitable way of describing a mainly unfunny comedy. The movie brings back Lloyd (Jim Carrey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels), sets up their reunion, and gives them another road trip into the land of the orderly and the stuffy. But, more important, it brings back the Farrelly brothers, who turn it into a comedy not merely of ideas but, rather, of meta-ideas—the main one being that the kind of comedy they do is still artistically significant and viable.
Doing something funny (here’s Harry Langdon, from 1925).
Doing something funny that becomes funnier through its cinematic composition (Charlie Chaplin’s great airplane sequence from “The Great Dictator”).
Doing something funny that doesn’t depend on performance at all, but only on cinematic composition (here’s one of Mel Brooks’s treasures, from “Blazing Saddles”; here’s Buster Keaton’s target practice, at 2:15, in “The High Sign”).
And 1-A: Saying something funny (here’s a clip from “Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic”).
The second is mainly the art of directors who are also their own comic stars—Chaplin, Keaton (sort of), Langdon (only a few times, but very, very well), Charley Bowers, Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis. These days, there are lots of actors who direct themselves, but they’re not mainly physical comedians.
The third category is the art of pure direction, and it’s the core of the Farrelly brothers’ art. The Three Stooges are in the first category—physical funny people—but when the Farrelly brothers made “The Three Stooges” they cast actors who aren’t comparably gifted antic actors. And when they do cast comic actors, they put them into tightly scripted sequences that seem to confine rather than liberate the actors’ talents.
That’s fine for Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Frank Tashlin, and other masters of meticulously calibrated comedy (and their meticulous and inspired screenwriters), because those directors do much more than highlight performance and spark laughter—they are image masters, whose comic inventions have a self-surpassing and self-multiplying symbolic density. And the reason for that symbolism is censorship—free-thinking directors needed to create an essentially Freudian art at a time when movies (and, for that matter, books, songs, and public life at large) were subject to stringent limits.
Certainly there are limits now, too, but they aren’t so stringent, and the transgressive Farrelly brothers seem to have been passed by in that regard, as well. In “Dumb and Dumber To,” they can be crude and gross, but they never come close to scaring or repelling anyone. The movie is rated PG-13, not because the Farrellys seem to be self-censoring but because their scatology and ribaldry are now utterly mainstream. Previously, I’ve suggested that the rise of Judd Apatow—who lets version 1-A funny people (verbally funny people) be funny in his movies—is the artist who rendered the Farrelly brothers instantly obsolete. But I think that there’s an added dimension to Apatow’s ascendancy: its ethical element. Not that the Farrellys are amoralists, but Apatow’s essential vision is the reconciliation of desire and duty, destructively riotous impulse and calculated arc, immediate pleasure and long-term life construction. There’s an inherent drama of economy (literal and metaphorical) in his comic tensions. He stages the very drama of performance in the performers’ own inclinations.
As for the brilliant physical mechanisms of the Farrellys’ gags, they remain undiminished: there are three, in “Dumb and Dumber To,” that happen so fast and are so delightful that I wanted the projectionist to rewind the digital files immediately and show them again. Alas, there were just three. They last a few seconds each. The movie runs a hundred and ten minutes. Even in this regard, the Farrellys have been left behind by such directors as Wes Anderson and Jared Hess, whose comic imaginings may not be as mechanically pure and efficient as those of the Farrellys but whose over-all sense of cinematic style is vastly more comprehensive and complex, and whose carefully composed humor—as well as their elaborate world view—is integral to that style.
On the other hand, the Farrelly brothers are comic artisans of an impressive consistency. The very composition of the film (which they co-wrote with Sean Anders, Mike Cerrone, John Morris, and Bennett Yellin) offers a meta-delight of movie epistemology, a question of the need and the wish to believe, at whatever cost, in the stories shown and told in movies. They coax some laughs from Rob Riggle and get some appealingly angular antics from the expressions and inflections of Rachel Melvin, and they give Kathleen Turner, too rarely seen, a hearty and grounded turn. The movie’s silliness is, in short, the work of intelligence and talent—which aren’t the same thing as inspiration and urgency.