Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Paul Clark — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Nowadays, it seems like Hollywood blockbusters are more or less pre-ordained. With budgets routinely crossing the $100 million mark and marketing costs often running into the tens of millions, studios leave very little to chance. By the time movies actually hit multiplexes, the Hollywood hype machine has done its job, and audiences have little choice but to do as they’re told, lining up for movies on opening weekend before moving along to the next big thing. However, occasionally a movie will break free of this usual pattern by striking a chord with audiences. For example, Titanic transcended normal blockbuster status to become a must-see movie, ruling the box office for several months on its way to raking in the highest domestic gross in history. But the following summer brought a word-of-mouth hit that, while it didn’t make Titanic money, completely shattered box-office expectations. The movie was There’s Something About Mary.

Most Hollywood pundits weren’t expecting a whole lot from There’s Something About Mary. In a summer filled with big stars and big budgets, it was a broad comedy with no A-list draws. Leading lady Cameron Diaz made a splash with her debut opposite comedy king Jim Carrey in The Mask, but since then she’d appeared mostly in independent fare, with her only other hit being 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, in which she played a supporting role. Likewise, her costars Matt Dillon and Ben Stiller were hardly major draws- Dillon was seen by many as an aging 80s teen idol who had since entered his character-actor phase, while Stiller was still more of a cult figure than a mainstream star. And while directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly had previously made the popular Dumb & Dumber, its success had been largely attributed to the presence of Carrey in the lead.

Following a series of enormously successful test screenings, the executives at Fox began to realize that they had something big on their hands, if only they played their cards right. Rather than sticking to the usual marketing tactics, they decided to let the movie sell itself, booking an unusually large number of preview screenings across the country, in the hope that the advance word of mouth would boost the film’s box office performance. The gamble paid off, although not right away- Mary was released in mid-July, between the summer’s biggest juggernauts, Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan. But while these movies dominated their first few weekends, Mary opened fairly strongly and maintained this strength as its competitors began to lose steam. Finally, in its eighth weekend of release, There’s Something About Mary topped the box-office charts- a phenomenon that was almost unprecedented.

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why audiences responded strongly to There’s Something About Mary. In the early nineties, many people started to tire of tepid PG-13 comedies, and hard-R laffers geared to adult audiences began to grow in popularity, in the process making stars out of people like Carrey and Adam Sandler. With Mary, the Farrellys tackled subject matter (and bodily functions) that had previously been taboo in big-budget comedies, and much of the film’s buzz centered around its sheer outrageousness. But there was more to Mary than dirty jokes. Most of the scatological comedies being made at the time were buddy movies, in which the female characters were mostly there for decorative purposes.

By contrast, Mary was at its heart a love story about a woman (Diaz) who attracts all the wrong men, and the mishap-prone guy (Stiller) who is her one perfect match. By breaking away from the usual formula for the genre, the Farellys were able to attract female viewers as well as male, making it the year’s mostly unlikely date movie. And in addition to the jokes themselves, the movie offered Diaz as a kind of dream girlfriend for the men in the audience- beautiful, yes, but also able to drink beer, hit golf balls, and talk about sports as well as any guy. Understandably, Diaz made the leap to A-list status on the basis of her Mary performance, and Stiller quickly became a hot commodity as well.

A decade later, it’s the romance that remains the most successful aspect of the movie, keeping the plot grounded even at its most outrageous. Diaz hasn’t been this appealing before or since, in part because the Farrellys understood her appeal. Many filmmakers have cast Diaz in daffy roles or as the sexpot, but her beauty isn’t so much sultry as baby-doll cute. Stiller makes a good match for Diaz- he’s good-looking enough that the relationship doesn’t seem too far fetched, but looks enough like an every-guy that the outcome of the story is hardly a foregone conclusion. And it says a lot about the Farrellys’ worldview that out of all the (mostly very strange) men who pine for Mary, the one we’re meant to root for is the one who is able to see her as a friend instead of an idealized lust object. When a man can have an extended conversation with a woman about the possibility of “meat in a cone,” the two of them must get along pretty well.

On the other hand, the wackier stuff hasn’t dated nearly so well. At the time of the film’s release, much of the buzz centered around such scenes as Stiller’s zipper mishap and the infamous “hair gel” gag, but now that the shock is worn off they come off not so much funny as desperate. There’s a certain comedic logic to the zipper scene, as one person after another crowds into Mary’s powder room to survey the damage (a nod to the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera), but the scene’s “money shot” is nothing but an oh-no-they-didn’t sight gag. And the hair gel bit just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either narratively or physically.

Likewise, the rogue’s gallery of crazy supporting characters wears thin pretty quickly. Matt Dillon’s performance as the untrustworthy shamus Pat Healy is growing on me, mostly because his performance acknowledges the disconnect between the hard-boiled sleazy detective Healy imagines himself to be and the manic loser he actually is. And when he’s trying to play smooth he’s a scream, especially during his priceless “retards” speech. But Chris Elliott is downright creepy as Stiller’s friend with a secret, and Lee Evans’ performance isn’t nearly as funny as the Farrellys think it is. When the camera lingers on his attempts to navigate a pair of crutches, it’s kind of pathetic, and once we find out the truth about Evans’ character, he futzes with an American accent so unconvincing that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

In the past decade or so, There’s Something About Mary has failed to live up to the “funniest movie ever” hype that once surrounded it. Yet considered in light of the Farrelly brothers’ more recent films, it may be more interesting now than it ever was. After Mary, the Farrellys were Hollywood’s reigning kings of lowbrow humor, but after their disappointing follow-up Me, Myself & Irene, their subsequent projects have grown less reliant on sight gags, generally favoring a more gentle, character-based kind of comedy. So far, these opposing comedic impulses achieved their most ideal balance in the brothers’ most personal film (and in my opinion, their best), 2003’s Stuck on You, but this shift was already evident in Mary, even if we didn’t know it yet. There’s Something About Mary may not be as uproariously funny as it was, but it’s a key film in the careers of its makers, and one without whose success their subsequent works may not have been possible.

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

The Screengrab : my best friend's wedding

Yesterday's Hits: There's Something About Mary (1998, Peter and Bobby Farrelly)

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks