Norbit Offensive to Obese People
Eddie Murphy Offends Fat People in His Portayal of Rasputia.
The lastest Eddie Murphy movie, "Norbit," has over-the-top characters and is riddled with tasteless fat jokes. It can be taken as offensive and fails to deliver humor.
If you enjoyed the characters portrayed by Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, you may also enjoy Norbit, his latest movie release. However, one of the main characters Murphy portrays in Norbit is an overweight woman named Rasputia. Rasputia is a dominating, manly, opinionated, loud, obnoxious, annoying, shrill and poorly-dressed obese woman.
In the story, Rasputia saves Norbit from playground bullies and makes him her boyfriend. Years later she is still dominating him. They are married, but when she is caught cheating on him, she tells him it never happened and threatens him. She is a controlling hypocrite.
I found myself hating this character (and the movie). Maybe Murphy was trying to show the extremes of the abuse he had to endure before he could really appreciate being with a woman he truly cared for, but I feel this character is over-the-top and portrays overweight people in a bad light. It is offensive and I failed to see the humor in it.
My problem with the Rasputia character is how over-the-top she really is. Unlike most overweight people, she is filled with self-confidence. She wears loud patterns, tight clothes, "sexy" outfits and – worst of all – a two-piece swimsuit. When going through the gate to a water park, she is questioned whether she is even wearing bottoms. She has to hoist up her stomach for him to see that her own body has completely covered them. She proceeds to break the front entrance due to her size, rip on the other woman for being too skinny and fly through a wooden gate after ignoring the weight limit on the waterslide and zooming down the slide at lightning speed.
Norbit is a movie that elicits laughter at the expense of obese people. The Rasputia character is based on prejudice towards obese women and taken to an extreme. And of course, Norbit (despite being a dorky man with a lisp and not much going for him in life) ends up with the skinny, pretty girl.
Although Eddie Murphy plays several characters in Norbit, which is normally seen as one of his strengths as an actor, he fails with this movie because of the stereotyped characters that he takes a few steps too far.
