Tom Shadyac makes broad comedies that want to be sermons, and the sermon always wins. When he trusts the joke he is a sharp comic director; when he trusts the message he is a kind one, which is not the same thing.
Fi1m perspective
Half an hour into Bruce Almighty (2003), Jim Carrey rearranges the moon. It is the largest thing anyone does in a Tom Shadyac film and it is played as a gag, the way everything in his comedies is played until the last act, when the gags stop and the lesson begins. That is the shape of nearly everything he has directed: a man with a gift or a flaw he cannot control, ninety minutes of physical comedy built on it, and a final reel in which he learns to be better. Shadyac started as a joke writer for Bob Hope at 24, and the training shows in how cleanly his scenes are set up and paid off. What he adds to the punchline is a homily.
The career divides neatly. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) launched Carrey as a star and Shadyac as a working comedy director, and the two went on to make Liar Liar (1997) and Bruce Almighty together. The Nutty Professor (1996), with Eddie Murphy, comes from the same period and the same mould. Steve Oedekerk has written for him twice. Then, after Evan Almighty, the studio comedies stopped. I Am (2010) is a documentary about materialism and how people are connected, which Shadyac directed, wrote and narrated, and Brian Banks (2019) is a drama taken from a true story of wrongful conviction. Whatever one makes of the later work, the man who made it was in the earlier films all along, tucked in behind the pratfalls.
The best of him is a rule he believes in. Liar Liar has one, a man who cannot lie for a day, and every scene tests it. Bruce Almighty has a far bigger one and does not trust it: the film has fun for half an hour, with Morgan Freeman and Steve Carell earning their laughs, and then spends seventy minutes backing away from what it set up. We laughed at the moon and at Carell, and we were properly restless by the end, because a comedy about a man with God's powers had stopped being about that and started telling us how to live. Shadyac has never hidden that this is what he is after. "For me, it’s not at all unusual to be on the set, having Jim talk out of his butt and then go home and read St. Thomas of Aquinas or Thomas Merton," he said in 2003, and both halves of that sentence are in the films.
The criticism that follows him is that the second half comes on too strong, and reviewers have said as much of Patch Adams (1998) and of Bruce Almighty. We would not call it cynical. Shadyac plainly means the uplift, and meaning it is his problem: he trusts the lesson more than the joke, and the joke is what he is good at. Watch Liar Liar for the director at his sharpest, and Bruce Almighty for its first half hour, then decide for yourself whether to stay for the sermon.
Biography
Tom Shadyac is an American film director, producer and writer. He was born Thomas Peter Shadyac on 11 December 1958 in Falls Church, Virginia.
Shadyac began his career as a joke writer for comedian Bob Hope and later earned a master's degree in film from UCLA. He is known for directing the comedies Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), Liar Liar (1997), Patch Adams (1998) and Bruce Almighty (2003), as well as the documentary I Am (2010) and the drama Brian Banks (2019).
