Twenty years ago this summer There's Something About Mary was a sensation - in part because it very literally had the measure of the times. 1998 was the Year of Monica, in which Ken Starr's Exhibit A was a certain blue dress in, ahem, less than pristine condition. The most famous scene in Mary featured the very same bodily fluid (well, not genetically, but you know what I mean). Peter and Bob Farrelly had just given us Dumb and Dumber and Ben Stiller had starred in Flirting with Disaster, both fine low comedies (I particularly like the "She sent me a John Deere letter" line in the former). But yoked together in There's Something About Mary all three effortlessly limboed under the bar of their own gleefully low standards. If you're looking for a scene involving a smouldering electro-shocked border terrier high on speed, it's hard to beat the one on offer here. It's traditional at this point for the insecure critic to invoke the grand tradition of Molière and Swift, but, to be honest, a better comparison is probably Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles) and the Zucker brothers (Airplane!, Naked Gun). What the Farrellys have done is apply gross-out comedy gags to mainstream romantic comedy, and, oddly enough, it works rather better than most contemporary entries to the genre - for example, the film that catapulted Miss Diaz to the brink of stardom, the insipid My Best Friend's Wedding.
We begin with a flashback — to high school in the Eighties, when an archetypal nerd of the period (Stiller) is asked to the prom by the foxiest babe in town (Cameron Diaz) — all because he stood up for her mentally handicapped brother. "I couldn't believe she knew my name," sighs Ted, looking back. "Some of my best friends didn't know my name." Unfortunately, calling to collect Mary, he makes the mistake of using her bathroom and snags the old pork-and-beans in his zipper. Within minutes, her parents, the police chief and his fire department are gathered around eagerly examining the portion of offending member protruding through his fly — a shot that surely merits an Oscar for Best Part in a Motion Picture. The evening ends prematurely with Ted, screaming and bleeding profusely, being taken away in an ambulance.
Cut to 1998. Ted is still single, still pining for Mary and still boring on about her to his pal (Chris Elliott). The chum suggests hiring a sleazy shamus, Healy (Matt Dillon, with spectacular Chiclet choppers), to find her, but, when he eventually tracks her down, the private dick is smitten, too. He follows Mary around, watching her helping out at the center for the disabled and later telling her girlfriends about her ideal man:
"He has to be self-employed."
"You mean like a drug dealer?"
"I was thinking of an architect. Someone who likes to travel."
Healy acts immediately: he accidentally bumps into her with a set of architectural blueprints, having just returned from his "condo in Nepal". Then he adds that architecture's all very well but not as rewarding as his volunteer work. "What's that?" asks Mary. "I work with retards," says Healy, showing his sensitive side.
Meanwhile, Stiller's character, driving south in hot pursuit, stops for a nocturnal pee at an interstate rest area but makes the mistake of choosing a gay pick-up spot just at the moment it's raided by the police. Even worse, he's arrested as a homosexual serial killer, the remains of whose latest victim have somehow found their way into his trunk. By the time he extricates himself and gets down to Florida, not only is Healy putting the moves on Mary, but so is "Tucker", a crippled English architect who is not what he seems, and is played by Britain's Lee Evans. A dear friend of mine helped discover Mr Evans and propel him to celebrity, but I have to say I always find his character the least persuasive of those besotted to the point of madness by Miss Diaz.
It would be unfair to give away what happens subsequently, except to say that it involves hives, whiteheads on eyelids, cruelty to dogs, an unusual hair gel, pendulous breasts with a George Hamilton tan that only seems to accentuate every wrinkle and a masturbation scene set to Bizet's Carmen (though they probably have the Oscar Hammerstein version in mind: "Beat Out Dat Rhythm On A Drum"). That last musical accompaniment is a good example of the Farrellys' attention to detail.
The brothers protest that they know the bounds of good taste: for example, they cut the scene where Mary's neighbor Magda uses tweezers to pluck a hair from her nipple. Their alleged mean-spiritedness — the dog jokes, the crip jokes, the homicidal-homo jokes - can seem a wee bit calculated, but are artfully poised against the sweet naïveté of the characters. Thus at the time the Farrellys identified as the critical scene the moment when Matt Dillon tracks down Mary in Florida and is smitten himself, and so attempts to dissuade Ben Stiller from pursuing her by saying she's ballooned to 300 pounds - but Stiller's character loves Mary and wants to see her anyway. If the brothers were to try that line these days, they'd be told that by implying there's something less attractive about large women they're being size-ist. Comedy has shriveled dramatically in the last two decades, and I find almost all Hollywood product labeled as such almost unwatchable. But Mary endures because of its particular blend of sweetness and vulgarity: awash in semen, it's nevertheless a markedly innocent film, both in sexual terms and in its broader disposition. Even the scummier characters have an appealing guilelessness, and holding it all together, in a peach of a performance she's never bettered, is Cameron Diaz, bobbling under her Olivia Newton-John bangs and entirey oblivious of the desperate stratagems to which she drives any man who stumbles across her. The guys - Stiller, Dillon, Elliott — are endearingly deranged in their pursuit: I especially liked Dillon's check pants and Hawaiian shirts.
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14 Member Comments
I remember this movie as being quite funny and also fairly innocent. Other than the "frank and beans" scene, I don't recall any nudity, violence or SJW posing. Ah, the good old days. Who knew that Cameron Diaz, formerly a model, could play a ditzy hot chick with a heart of gold?!
Nice review Mark.
The gross scenes aside, TSAM is still the funniest movie of the last quarter century, roughly a tie with The Big Lebowski. But TBL didn't have Cameron Diaz. My gaffer buddy who has worked with Cameron says she is a sweetheart in real life too.
Welcome back Mark, you were missed.
"Comedy has shriveled dramatically in the last two decades,"Basketball Barry" sandwiched in between George Bush and Donald Trump is the reason for the "shrinkage". Hick followed by Hip followed by Horror. According to the MSM is why. Late Night Comedy has ceased to be funny.
Adolescent humor magnified by adults works for just so long.
Stiller and his Posse took to "singing" the Ave Maria in one of his recent lowering the bar comedies. Some things should not be touched, the line in the sand was crossed, I'm done with him and all his works.
...somehow "Mary" is even funnier now, with Mark's recounting of it. And it reminds me too that the "something" which the character of Mary has, is never actually explained in the movie. And that was because it didn't need to be in those days. The something Mary has, which been the flame for moths over millenia no doubt, is not so common these days at least in Hollywood. A woman who is not in love with her own image.
For many reasons that Mark noted this intentionally 'offensive' film could never be made today. Today, Mary's retarded (now a banned word) brother could never be treated as just another character with the same flaws and foibles as everyone else in the film. That is truly liberating and this performance is hilarious and not at all mean spirited. The scene where he is coxed into the batting cage and gets boinked with a baseball is an example of brilliant editing with a quick cut to him happily enjoying an ice cream cone. All too often protected minorities today, whether sexual, disabled or racial must be treated as living saints or watch out for the PC thought police. This low brow film is an art form in and of itself and is side-splitting end to end. The Farrelly brothers have always been fans of the 3 stooges and it shows here. Love this film.
I have a close and appealingly self-deprecating friend who likes to retail his "meat and two veg" story, one which happened to him during his college years. As he prepared for a night out he got his wedding tackle "entangled in the rigging as it were." The local fire department had to be summoned and a version of the "jaws of life" had to be applied. I am confident that nobody would make up such a story and he tells it with such consistently scrupulous detail that it has to be true.
As to low-brow humor - I have been watching podcasts of "The Best of "Married With Children", This ran for ten years in the nineties and I had forgotten how screamingly funny it was and how it shattered every politically correct barrier in it's path. The endless stream of perfectly-timed jokes about boobies, fat women, dumb bimbos, lazy housewives, flatulent shoe salesmen, strip-clubs, promiscuity, cheating husbands, bodily waste, bowel functions, toilets, selfish yuppies, gays, vacuous feminists, alcoholism, selfish girlfriends and really REALLY dumb men could not be made today. This WAS humor worthy of a Swift or a Rabelais. It was the American home-and-family as battlefield but often done in a way that was (somehow) quite touching. The cast couldn't have been bettered and the (truly) creative staff spun comic gold from the Bundy's for a decade. Where else could you do a Christmas show based on the tired-and-trite "It's a Wonderful Life" concept and make it hilarious by bringing in the late Sam Kinison to play the foul-mouthed, alcoholic and wonderfully depraved Christmas Ghost? Give me shows like this and the hell with "The Big Bang Theory." .
This movie is why I changed to button fly jeans. And it has Brett Favre's best cameo.
A Ben Stiller movie to me is as a cross is to a vampire, but I have gotten a few chuckles out of some of his flicks. For instance, when David Hasselhoff appeared as the coach of the German team in Dodgeball. Obviously, Bergman could have done so much more with the material, which is another reason Stiller disappoints.
So I'm guessing you're the vampire then? Not saying that Ben Stiller is Jesus or anything, mind you.
I can't say that I've seen all of Stiller's work (or even a lot of it) or that I'm a raving fan. What I can say is that what I've seen for the most part I've been pleasantly surprised with. Tropic Thunder is what really comes to mind when I think if his work and there are so many threads in that film that are so well done that it's hard to summarize. Robert Downey Jr. playing a white guy playing a black guy, and almost all of the guys playing actors with the exception of Tom Cruise, who's playing someone you'd never recognize - it's a thoroughly entertaining movie. Stiller co-wrote the screenplay, directed, and starred in it so I'd say he deserves much of the credit.
Jack Black also has some surprisingly good work. What I think about most with him is Be Kind Rewind (the ladder gang..., or 'he can't read!'), but as I recall I was quite surprised by his serious role in King Kong. There were some funny guys around and perhaps there still are, but they dare not show their talent these days for fear of never working again.
.....I think the character Tom Cruise was specifically lampooning was Mr H Weinstein actually?
I'm suffering from a bit of 90s nostalgia after reading this article. It's remarkable that it isn't the raunch that has transgressed modern sensibilities but rather the earnestness and sincerity of the characters. One suspects the aversion to old timey innocence isn't due entirely to pervasive cynicism. We quickly approaching the point at which vice and virtue will have changed places in the moral order of the universe. There was an episode of the Simpsons in which Marge remarked that "fox turned into a hardcore pornography channel so gradually i hardly noticed". However, it turns out that instead of getting nude we got prude (in a sort inverted-virtue evangelical libertinism fashion). Prepare for the 2030 version of White Christmas where Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye discover that their old army general was actually in service of the capitalist colonial complex and instead of putting on a show to raise money for his inn they put on a protest to return the inn to the local indian tribe.Bing will deliver full frontal nudity during a one night romp with Danny Kaye during which they will sing about the joys of being childless.Well maybe we quite get there... I hope!
I have a suggestion that may or may not be of interest to people on here. If the full price of the cruise is too much for some, perhaps a pre and / or post cruise dinner and drinks evening could be added to the itinerary that people could sign up for at a fraction of the cost. It might be a way for those not too far away from either end of the cruise to be able to gather and meet others from The Club. It could also bookend the trip for those taking part in it, though perhaps there are already such events planned while underway. This probably wouldn't be practical for anyone that lives far away as travel expenses would be prohibitive for a single evening event, but I understand that there are a lot of people that live on the Eastern part of this continent and it might work for them.
typo: "to be honest, a beter comparison"
I remember seeing this when it came out and had a great time at the theatre with my date, laughing it up quite a bit. I don't recall a whole lot about it now, and it seems at the same time not so long ago but in a past long lost. Perhaps it's something worth checking out again at some point.
I always did and still do like Blazing Saddles; man there was some over the top stuff in there but it was done well and was funny. For supposedly low-brow humor it had a lot of well thought out material.
Leslie Nielsen was another favorite of mine, and the short lived series Police Squad has a kind of humor that I find particularly amusing because of its dexterity with language. It also helped a lot if you had grown up watching shows like Canon, Kojak, and other police detective dramas of the 70's because you could see how they even spoofed the format (and the spoken episode titles were always different than the written ones).
A fine choice for a review this time, in my opinion.