There’s Something About Mary
Peter and Bobby Farrelly (1998)
A lively, messy comedy – the liveliness trumps the messiness (and the messiness increases the sense of liveliness). The Farrelly brothers try a lot of things; some work, others don’t but because the things keep coming you don’t get bored. An example. Over the opening credits, a guitarist (Jonathan Richman) and a drummer (Tommy Larkins) perform a making-it-up-as-they-go-along theme song. Its meandering, maundering sincerity is amusing. In the course of the film – the story of how several men, but chiefly the awkward and unlucky Ted Stroehman, adore and/or lust after Mary Matthews née Jensen (she changed her name to try and get rid of a stalker) – this duo returns to resume their terrible musical commentary on what’s happening. It doesn’t take long for this running joke – inspired by the Greek chorus in Mighty Aphrodite? – to become tedious but the Farrellys redeem things when, at the very end, yet another Mary fan materialises. This deus-diabolus ex machina silences the guitarist with a bullet aimed for Ted, who has finally landed the prize of Mary.
The Farrellys, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ed Decter and John B Strauss, mete out a succession of gross, sometimes physical painful humiliations on the mostly squalid characters. Although they can make you wince, these incidents and the Farrellys’ approach aren’t offensive, partly because they’re cartoonishly extreme, mostly thanks to the sympathetic charm of the main actors, and especially Cameron Diaz as Mary. Diaz is perfectly cast and gives a perfect performance. Her spectacular looks take your breath away. Her sunny straightforwardness – played off against the variously unprepossessing men who resort to crap disguises and tie themselves in duplicitous knots to try and win her – makes you smile. The fact that the radiantly naïve Mary is meant to be a successful orthopaedic surgeon is a fairly good joke in itself. Ben Stiller has been accused of making too many films but the few I’ve seen (before this one, Your Friends and Neighbors, The Royal Tenenbaums, a bit of Meet the Fockers, and Greenberg) suggest that he’s versatile enough to justify frequent appearances. As the lovelorn Ted, Stiller proves to be as skilled playing straight man in a scene as he is at generating the primary comic momentum in it. He’s also likeable. In the role of Pat Healy, the private detective hired by Ted to find Mary and who then decides he wants her for himself, Matt Dillon, with a disfiguring sleazy moustache, is funny too. He keeps his acting naturalistic, even in the sequence in which Healy, having drugged Mary’s neighbour’s dog and sent it into a coma, attempts and eventually achieves resuscitation. (The fakeness of the dog double used here makes the animal’s rigor mortis very effective.)
Lee Evans is another of Mary’s suitors and the Farrellys make good use of his aptitude for physical comedy and doing funny voices that are also human. The cast also includes Chris Elliott as Dom, Ted’s best friend (or so Ted thinks), and Lin Shaye as Magda, Mary’s neighbor in Florida, who owns the dog. Dom keeps breaking out in hives but his complexion is not as worrying as Magda’s grey-going-on-orange. At one point, Magda’s face is licked enthusiastically by her dog. Not much later, Ted wanks, ejaculates onto his ear lobe, and Mary mistakes the semen for hair gel, which she just happens to need. The convergence of these two bits brought to mind the last scene of Happiness and made me wonder if the Farrelly brothers were pinching from it. In fact, There’s Something About Mary was released a few weeks before Todd Solondz’s movie. The collection of (proper) songs on the soundtrack is eclectic and enjoyable.
2 September 2010