I am not a fan of Ricki Lake and Craig Scheffer fails to excite me as well, but put them together in a formulatic love story about a "handsome" man falling for a "fat girl" and it comes to a somewhat entertaining film.
Ricki Lake is Grace, a young, hideously overweight girl who works a secluded job at a funeral parlor, but longs for love and adventure in the real world. Of course, since she is fat(and this is a movie), she isn't getting any and this becomes frustrating, particularly after her new step-mother Wanda points out to her that she needs to lose a lot of weight before she could find love. Humiliated, Grace pretends that she does have a boyfriend "who loves her just the way she is", and now (of course), Wanda and Grace's father want to meet him, so Grace must come up with a man. She manages to find Rob, a handsome young man who truly does seem to like her. After a little bit of persuasion, he agress to visit her family in the guise of her lover, and soon it seems that he is doing more than just pretending. He actually likes Grace!
But there is one hitch...Rob already has a girlfriend, she's just visiting her family and Rob is bored without her and longs for more than the company of his obnoxious friends. Grace and Rob make a fine pair of friends(except for one occasion when Rob's buddies show up and he moves away from Grace, causing her to wail, "you're ashamed to be seen with me"--such stereotypical lines are one of the fallbacks of this film.), but they know it can't last forever, and when his real girlfriend, Olivia, storms in on them, things go from bad to worse. Now what is Grace to do?
I am not the biggest fan of love stories, and the romance between Grace and Rob failed to really interest me, though it was nice of Hollywood to attempt to give hope to the "fat girls" by saying that good looking boys COULD love them. The rest of the film, dealing with Grace's relations to everybody, is less than appealing, as we see that she is judged simply by her weight. This isn't depicted as "right" of course, but the constant preachy lines("nobody knows what it's like to move around in this large body")and the over-blown "prejudices" to Grace get a little tiresome. Particularly grueling is the scene where Olivia does catch Grace and Rob and in a fit of rage begins to hit Grace with her purse while saying things like "you fat, ugly b*&^! You make me SICK!" While most people would have howled with laughter, Lake dramatically falls to the ground, and it becomes hard to tell if she IS laughing hysterically, or sobbing and making a spectacle of herself. A less than underwhelming climactic scene, to say the least in a rather sub-par, though slightly entertaining film.
