Understanding the Farrelly Brothers

Rating: 7/10 (13 July 2006)

The most important thing to remember about The Ringer is that it's a Farrelly Brothers production, after they've done films like Stuck on You (2003) and Fever Pitch (2005). Largely because of films like Dumb & Dumber (1994) and There's Something About Mary (1998), which were fairly outrageous comedies for mainstream films in the mid-1990s, the Farrelly Brothers developed a reputation for daring films where the jokes kept arriving one after the other. Because of that, some people have been disappointed with their more recent films, which are just as concerned with being sweet and romantic as they are with being funny. But the truth is that their films have always been sweet, romantic comedies. They've just mellowed a bit over the years. They're not quite as frantic as they used to be, the jokes are not non-stop (or meant to be), we've gotten more used to their sensibility, and others have focused on making comedies even more outrageous.
Even thought the Farrelly Brothers didn't write or direct The Ringer, their stamp is all over the film, and it should be thought of as much or more as a Farrelly Brothers film than a Johnny Knoxville vehicle, and certainly it seems more like a Farrelly Brothers film than a Barry W. Blaustein film. This is only Blaustein's second turn in the director's chair, and with his first film a wrestling documentary from 1999, Blaustein is more well known at this point as a writer of several Eddie Murphy films. The Ringer scripter Ricky Blitt has mostly worked in television, on shows such as "Family Guy" and "The Jeff Foxworthy Show".
Like most of the Farrelly Brothers' films, The Ringer focuses on people who are outcasts for some reason--people who don't fit into social norms. But despite misconceptions to the contrary (and other filmmakers actually doing this), the Farrelly Brothers have never really ridiculed those people. Their concern is instead to show how people and things that are different are valuable in ways that mainstream society might not expect; to show how people who are different have universal human characteristics, but at the same time, not to underplay their differences. They sincerely love their characters. So expecting The Ringer to approach its subject matter in a way that would make fun of it or ridicule it would be off-base--not because they're being politically correct, but because it's not consistent with the Farrelly Brothers' world-view (and thus to take The Ringer as offensive is particularly bizarre). Maybe that's why, over the years, they've shifted slightly away from outrageous comedy as a focus--they may have felt that that genre contributed to audiences misreading them. So you shouldn't expect The Ringer to be primarily concerned with getting big laughs, either. It's more just quirky.
Of course Knoxville gets to do some of the physical stunts that made him famous, and The Ringer is funny at times, but the humor arrives more strongly in the second half, and rather than laughing at the Special Olympics, with the audience members belonging to the mainstream, the humor here obtains by inducting you (just like Knoxville) into the Special Olympics fold so that you can laugh at the mainstream (and maybe that's more what people are finding offensive--not everyone embraces the different like the Farrelly Brothers do). At the same time, The Ringer develops a romance subplot that shouldn't be unexpected.
However, that Knoxville does a bit of his usual shtick may be one of the small flaws here. More than likely he took this role in an attempt to stretch his range a bit, which he does well, but the Jackass-styled stunts, as entertaining and funny as they are at times, probably contribute to some viewers misreading the film and taking it for a failure because it's not making them laugh enough, or it isn't outrageous enough. Another slight flaw might be that the first half lingers a bit too long--The Ringer comes to a boil very slowly, but it's an enjoyable film if you take it for what it is rather than trying to force it into a narrow genre compartment.