Me, Myself & Irene

Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s film invents its own diagnosis: the name hung on Charlie is advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage. That invented phrase is the load bearing beam under every joke, and exactly where the objections landed. Rita Baron-Faust’s review in the British Medical Journal sets the difference out plainly: split personality is a dissociative disorder, not schizophrenia, and people living with schizophrenia tend to withdraw rather than swing between mild and enraged the way the film has it. The film also resolves the condition through willpower and romance rather than treatment. In Britain, Mind, the National Schizophrenia Fellowship and the Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a joint statement saying the film treated schizophrenia, its symptoms and its treatments as a joke, and planned to hand out leaflets outside three hundred cinemas. Shooting was done entirely in Rhode Island and Vermont, starting in Jamestown. It was the second time the Farrellys worked with Jim Carrey, after Dumb and Dumber. The budget was $51 million and the film took more than $149 million worldwide. A good fit if you think Charlie’s three grown sons, foul mouthed maths prodigies running a comic register of their own, are the best thing here. Not for anyone who cannot stomach a joke whose whole foundation is schizophrenia being mistaken for multiple personality.