January 12, 2006, 8:31 a.m.
There’s Something About “Special”
Handwringing over The Ringer.

By Louis Wittig

Is political correctness a condom or is it a three-story tall, angular steel statue of Vladimir Lenin? Feel free to read the question again. Weigh your choices. No immediate answer is necessary.

Several weeks ago, in the buzz-o-sphere, there was a sense that history was about to be made. No moon-landing history, of course, but The Ringer, a Farrelly brothers movie starring Johnny Knoxville as Steve Barker, a man who attempts to fix the Special Olympics, was to be in theaters imminently. Joel Stein, opining in the Los Angeles Times, believed that the "last laugh barrier" was falling. The future was bright. A film had arrived that would let us laugh at the mentally retarded like Dave Chapelle, In Living Color, and Richard Pryor let white people laugh at blacks. The only important question was, now that the mentally challenged were on the table, what wouldn't we be able to laugh at?

The Ringer, it turns out. Pushed into the farcical fraud by his equally farcical Uncle Gary (Brian Cox in a sleazy moustache), Barker slips into the Special Olympic Village as his developmentally delayed alter ego, Jeffy. For a man who made his name in Hollywood with a camcorder, a sledgehammer, and his friends' gonads, Knoxville's impression of someone with a disablingly low I.Q. is surprisingly spurious. Almost immediately he has the audience's interest wrestled away from him by a supporting-cast klatch of Special Olympians. Most of the drollery that follows consists of them making Steve look and feel like the handicapped one. Intermittently, the outline of a truly brave comedy breaks the surface. One of the group, Glenn (Jed Rees) meanders around distributing random, repetitive hugs. When Steve accidentally scratches a CD belonging to his roommate, Billy (Edward Baranbell), Billy threatens, "do that one more time and you'll be admiring my butt on the pavement through a straw."

The blank disbelief on Knoxville's face is just enough to make the movie's point — that the slow are fully self-aware and quicker than you'd think — and almost enough to redeem it.

But writer Ricky Blitt and director Barry Blaustein (the Farrellys were just producers this time) don't seem to get this. They submerge The Ringer's promise with waves of saccharine syrup. The Special Olympians finger Steve for a fraud, but conspire to keep him in the competition so he can take down Jimmy (Leonard Flowers): a one-man Special Olympics dream team who arrives at the games in a limo with a vanity plate that reads "SPESHL J." Predictability ensues. His new friends tell Steve that they never let anyone tell them they can't succeed. Steve tells Uncle Gary never to call them "retards" again (and he doesn't, no one does. The r word is used three times in almost two hours. The preferred nomenclature is "special.") After all this, Blaustein probably could have slipped in the Chariots of Fire theme without a hint of irony.

A necessary production note: Representatives of the Special Olympics were involved at every step, to make sure the heretofore taboo was done tastefully. They had a line-item veto on the script. It shows. The Ringer is, ultimately, a movie that has its protective headgear strapped on tight and a tremendous letdown. Though this might have been for the best.

Now, which is it? Is political correctness more like a behemoth Bolshevik icon, or is it like a condom?

The stock conservative answer would probably be "Lenin": Political correctness is dour and authoritarian, bent as it is on making people express themselves in an approved way. And so watching The Ringer's trailers was like watching a raucous crowd of "South Park conservatives" loop chains around Lenin's neck and bring him down. Freedom! And hang-up-free laughs for all. However, watching those moments when The Ringer comes closest to openly mocking the mentally challenged, a pinch of guilt is mixed with the anticipation. You are, after all, laughing at the handicapped-ness of the handicapped.

Political correctness was originally supposed to be a linguistic condom. Once everyone was speaking (and thinking) fluent P.C., previously marginalized, presently euphemized groups would be protected from all the nastiness inherent in the way people used to speak about them. Nonsense, by the way — and not coincidentally, exactly the type of patronizing that The Ringer wants to sock it to as it films its Olympians singing "Respect" over the closing credits. Still, the condom comparison is worth something. When you wrap your thoughts and words in a sheath of politically correct terminology — ensconcing "fat" and "retard" in "person of size" and "developmentally delayed" — you are consciously separating your subjects from coarse reality. It provides a comfort zone for you, artificial though it may be, allowing you to avoid the fact that you might find funny something that would cause pain to someone else.

It's possible to come to approach this innate callousness and still go to pieces at the thought of a fat man trying to squeeze into a jacket eight sizes too small for him. If we believe that the fat man can take it, or better yet, own it, we can laugh easy. And it's possible to believe, or fool ourselves into believing, that almost any group of adults can take our laughter.

As much as The Ringer wants us to believe otherwise, there is something special about those we call "special." The sharp gloss its cameras try to put on dull smiles and thick glasses is impressive and rightly reminds its audience away from maudlin pity. It can't hide the obvious, that Special Olympians aren't exactly adults, and that they don't feel as clearly able to take it.

If it hadn't held its punches, The Ringer could have been a mercilessly funny movie. In the process it would have nudged its audience to confront how merciless funny can be. As it is, The Ringer confirms a fact that's as it should be: Special people create a special exemption for conservatives' general hostility to political correctness.

— Louis Wittig is a writer living in New York.