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Sick at heart >> There's Something About Mary proves love can be a repulsive thing
by ANNIE ILKOW
There's Something About Mary is the spawn of the Farrelly brothers, and makes their previous oeuvre (Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin) look like the mature work of sober artists. True to its billing as a love story (the love of Three Stooges), There's Something About Mary is a disgusting, adolescent, calculated hold-up of the whole sick institution of romantic comedy--in short, genius. Not genius as in great art, but there's something about pure slapstick and out-of-bounds humour that does as much to uncork the human spirit as any creative work touched by inspiration. And the Farrellys are certainly touched.
Thirteen years later, still obsessed by his close encounter with an angel (a Charlie's Angel), Stiller hires craven greaseball P.I. Matt Dillon (in a refreshingly non-dreamboat role) to track her down. "So you're stalking her," Dillon says to Stiller, nailing the disturbing premise of this classic genre. A love-crazed suitor pulls out all the stops (including manipulating, spying and making a shambles of the other person's life) to meet/mate with the object of desire. This is the fun-loving axiom of most romantic comedies from Bringing Up Baby to Addicted to Love. Sneaky is not creepy if they fall for it. In creating this hyperbolic, hyper-glandular take on the genre, the Farrelly's reach new highs in lows. Anyone who has seen Kingpin surely remembers the landlady's means of exacting rent payment from Woody Harrelson, or the Indecent Proposal he accepts for Randy Quaid. In There's Something About Mary, the gags are perfectly repulsive and repulsively perfect; sure, it's adolescent and predictable, but this is no Ernest's Lampoon Vacation either. By the end of the film there is a whiff of a serious idea--the psychotic lengths the characters have gone to in order to woo Mary overturn the conventions of romantic comedy to reveal its ugly underbelly. Of course, the film wraps up in a happy ending. But all the blinking, star-crossed loving in the world would never allow you to forget that this is just a movie--and therefore anything's allowed. Here is a film that is free of the ravages of good taste, dining out on every sacred cow there is. From its depiction of the physically and mentally challenged to the moisturizer-challenged, there's something to offend everyone. And although Chris Elliott's latex facial blemishes are unforgivable, the movie always does a smart about-face whenever it goes too far, as if to say, "We know... but you laughed!" What provides the biggest kick (and the reason the Farrellys know their business), is seeing respectable A-list actors, like Stiller, Dillon and Diaz humiliate themselves tirelessly in scene after ludicrous scene. Stiller has cut out a place for himself as the unforgivable, intelligent whiner, but who knew he'd be so brilliant with a fishhook through his face? Matinée idols Dillon and Diaz, with their well-groomed images, deserve some respect for acting so dorky. If the film had been cast with SNL goofs, it would have been preaching to the perverted, but this cast will draw a wider, hipper audience. The "date movie" crowd are in for a bit of a shock, though, if the ads don't scare them off first.
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If you think there's any way you could ever enjoy a film which features jism accidentally applied as hair gel, keep reading. You may be juvenile enough to be persuaded to see one of the most 'tardo, repulsive films in years.
Start with a premise that is as thin as an overworked cliché: in a high school flashback, we learn that nebishy nice guy Ted (Ben Stiller) fell in love with blonde supergirl Mary (Cameron Diaz, her character is a kind of cross between a fawn and Mother Teresa). The night of their first date--the prom--Stiller gets his meat-and-two-veg caught in the zipper of his taupe tux. In the ensuing humiliation, Mary leaves town and he never sees her again.