ALONG CAME POLLY
Rating: 2/5 stars
REVIEW BY JOHN ULMER (Copyright, 2004)
Ben Stiller had better be careful. He's wearing his comedy shtick into
the ground. It worked in "There's Something About Mary," "Meet the
Parents," and "Keeping the Faith." Now it's getting a bit old. His
comedy usually relies on monkey gestures and crazy facial features,
such as when he baby-talks to Puffy the dog in "Mary" or when he
insults a picture of Robert De Niro during the closing credits of
"Parents." Stiller is very distinct in his comedy but now he's passed
over the line into stereotyping himself. Whereas his comedy counter
piece, Owen Wilson ("Zoolander," "Starsky and Hutch"), came to public
attention with terrific performances and has grown (career-wise) ever
since, Stiller is typecasting himself. They're both brilliant sorts of
comedians in my book, perhaps the modern day equivalent of the
bickering Lemmon and Matthau. But Stiller's whole approach to comedy
is, unfortunately, becoming repetitive. He's a funny man (and I
thought he directed "The Cable Guy" very well much to the disagreement
of most cinemagoers and critics) but I'd love to see him tackle a
truly daring role sometime in the near future.
In "Along Came Polly" he plays another bumbling, nervous, neurotic
fool who falls in love with an adventurous woman and then realizes
that although they are both very different, they really belong to each
other. The crazy girl is Polly Prince ("spelled with a 'p'"), played
by Jennifer Aniston with great casualness and occasionally annoying
whining rants. It's unfortunate that Polly isn't given more depth
since she comes across as -- no offense to Aniston or anyone
associated with the character -- a total bewitch. (Sorry, can't write
the actual word -- this review has to be family friendly.) Polly is a
playful, outlandish person, who doesn't really care about anything and
has a deep-rooted fear of intimacy and commitment, whereas on the
other hand Rubin (Stiller), her new "friend" she once knew in middle
school and has now become reacquainted with, is a total nut job.
Rubin's greatest fear is to contract a deadly virus from a hand bowl
full of nuts. "On average one out of six people wash their hands after
going to the bathroom," Rubin tells Polly in a bar after she reaches
for a complimentary bowl of nuts. "Maybe seventeen people a night eat
out of that thing. That's one hundred and nineteen people a week."
Polly sees things completely different.
Rubin has no sense of adventure at all. He is Polly's complete
opposite. In the beginning, Rubin gets married to his sweetheart, Lisa
(Debra Messing). As they honeymoon on a tropical island, Rubin walks
in on Lisa having sex with a scuba diver instructor, Claude (Hank
Azaria). The entire situation occurred in the first place because of
the fact that Rubin was too scared to go scuba diving and risk
"accidents."
Rubin sells life insurance, which explains his constant worries. To
him, everything is judged by percentages, such as the miniscule chance
that he could be hit by a car on his way home from work. Because he is
constantly surrounded by these digital numbers representing the thin
line between life and death, Rubin's anxiety has grown, mutating into
a very nervous creature. Sometimes during the movie Stiller is so
erratic that it is painful to watch him. Oh, and did I mention that
Rubin has irritable bowel syndrome, meaning that any exotic foods can
result in messy outcomes? (The scene explaining this is a very blatant
rip-off of the infamous bathroom scene from "Dumb and Dumber," and
it's not even half as funny. Even the farting noises are irritating.)
The film's true humor comes from the rather unexpected performance by
Alec Baldwin as Rubin's boss. Almost unrecognizable buried under a
stunning amount of body weight, not to mention a very thick New York
accent, Baldwin's few scenes provide at the very least a few smiles.
And the other gem performance is by Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Rubin's
best friend, Sandy; an ex-child-star who made it big in a movie called
"Crocodile Tears," in which he played a popular high school character
whose trademark became the playing of bagpipes (which is never really
explained). In the film's best moment, and the one in which it finally
manages to actually satirize something, the poster in Sandy's wall is
an exact duplicate of "The Breakfast Club's" famous poster logo -- and
listen carefully to the background music throughout this scene. Does
it sound familiar?
That was one of the only parts I laughed at, unfortunately. I really
did expect a fair amount of satisfaction from "Polly." Other than a
surprisingly sexual scene with Aniston in tight underwear there is
nothing unexpected about this rather mediocre comedy. It's written by
the comedy duo who penned "Meet the Parents," a far superior comedy,
which may explain my high expectations from the start, and rather
dissatisfied opinion of the finished product. I wish more time had
been spent comparing the two characters, and adding depth to their
profiles, instead of making a headlong rush towards the abrupt ending.
The movie tries to preach to us that we all should live our lives like
Polly: careless and without worry, because as one character says in
the stereotypical Big Inspirational Speech of the film, we only live
our miserable lives once, and why make it completely miserable instead
of looking for the good in things? This is a fine moral but the movie
never decides whether its audience should mimic their lives after
Rubin or Polly. At the end of the movie we are led to believe that
marriage is wrong, and then we learn that maybe marriage is a good
thing, after all. We also learn that Polly has some major problems yet
we're supposed to be inspired by her life. "Along Came Polly" isn't
really all that funny, with lots of bodily humor and silly juvenile
jokes, not to mention a rather disappointingly contrived performance
by Phillip Seymour Hoffman who tries (to no avail) to make his
character realistic. But worse than that, the film leaves us wondering
what its true message is, hidden underneath the thick layer of crude
fart and poo jokes and bad innuendo. I wish it would make up its mind.
Maybe then it would have been a bit easier to enjoy. Probably not.
- John Ulmer
http://www.wiredonmovies.com
e-mail: webmaster@wiredonmovies.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 37674 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1276210 X-RT-TitleID: 1129121 X-RT-SourceID: 1382 X-RT-AuthorID: 6769 X-RT-RatingText: 2/5
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews