The 2022-2023 Film Journal Entry #40: "Heavyweights"

The 2022-2023 Film Journal Entry #40: "Heavyweights"

2022-2023 Film Journal Entry #40

by Xavier E. Palacios

"Heavyweights"

4 out of 5

Directed by Steven Brill

Rated PG

Gerry Garner (Aaron Schwartz) is a socially inept, heavyweight boy who is forced to attend a summer at Camp Hope: a fat camp. He soon meets Hope's routine campers, like the frank Roy (Kenan Thompson) and the joker Josh (Shaun Weiss), and the counselors, such as the fat and wonderful Pat (Tom McGowan). Happily, Gerry learns that Camp Hope is actually a great place, and the close campers accept him as one of their own. However, the camp is bought out by the villainous, selfish Tony Perkis Jr. (Ben Stiller) and his crew of devious counselors, who eliminate the camp's supportive and fun nature in favor of discouraging and harsh weight-loss regimes so that Perkis can make a successful informercial for his own gain. The boys unite against such hardship proudly, but Perkis' reign of terror begins to put them in danger and have them question their value as people. Together, with the help from Pat and the other good counselors, Gerry and the campers' scheme to take back Camp Hope for themselves and begin to understand how they can foster their own self-esteem.

I will not say that the following absence of such pictures today is a testament to the overwhelming fact that, circa somewhere in the mid-2010s, we as a collective species were cast into a dystopian society, but this film certainly reminds me that my childhood of the late '90s and early 2000s was filled with kid flicks about children uniting against tyrannical adults. Some of them were bad, some were okay, and some were great. Yet they were all works that were intended to speak to young audiences about a subject they all understood: adults can be awful and should be stood up to when they are not wise leaders but horrible bullies. If for nothing else, Heavyweights makes me wonder why this comedy sub-genre seems to have long died out. My paranoid brain says that adults no longer want children to know they have rights to disobey unjust grown-ups, but that would be giving Hollywood executives far too much credit.

This flick also reminded me of a weird high school memory. My Spanish teacher, for reasons I gracefully can no longer remember, was discussing famous Hispanics. She got around to filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, whose work I was familiar with back then, but I had not yet fallen in love with. Del Toro, for those who do not know, is a large man, and was fatter when I first learned about him. The photograph my teacher had of him in her presentation was one with him and his first wife: a slender lady. The image had clear Beauty and the Beast vibes, considering his obesity.

Things may be different now, when I am old enough to know loving pairs come in all shapes and sizes, but back then I believed no ugly dude got with anybody, let alone any sort of living Adonis; and few were uglier than fat kids. Looking at the photograph, my teacher stopped with an expression of surprise, like she did not know how to explain the impossible before her students. She was weirded out that a guy like that could end up with a lady like that. To try and explain the anomaly, as if the balance of nature had to be tended to, my teacher said something along the lines of, "Well, there's somebody for everyone". Yikes.

Sitting in her classroom, I felt a kind of second-hand shame from her comment. My teacher was not positively saying that everybody deserves love and love can be given to anyone; damn what culture and media says. She was trying to sooth fears that we lived in a mad universe by clarifying, look, even a fat freak like Del Toro can get some, even when fate was clearly against him. It just is what it is, somehow, and while we think his wife was crazy for loving him, we should not judge here. Again: yikes. Maybe she was not being so malicious, but to a very unattractive Latino in a ghetto-prison high school, whose sins and scars are being made more and more clear to me as I get older, her remarks made me feel embarrassed and increased my self-hatred. Though she was only talking about a fella who would become one of my favorite filmmakers, I felt she was talking about me, and I took years to realize her confusion about Del Toro's first marriage was woefully unjustified.