There’s Something About Mary (1998)

There’s Something About Mary: 1998, dir. Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Seen on DVD (April 8).
There’s Something About Mary ruined my life, I tell you. Well, slightly.
I hadn’t seen the movie, but I felt its effects. I read scripts for a film competition in 1999 and it was obvious that a certain scene in this movie had an effect on comedy screenplays. Suddenly the taboos on precious bodily fluids in film had been lifted.

In short, I read so many goddamn ejaculation scenes, most of which were poorly written and/or disgusting, that I resolved never to see There’s Something About Mary, the movie that inspired them.
Besides, I had walked out of Dumb and Dumber and didn’t want to see anything else along those lines, ever again. I hate gross-out humor and bodily function humor and dumb-dumb humor—hell, I didn’t like Shrek— so I was sure that Farrelly brothers movies were not for me.
Over the years, people have told me that There’s Something About Mary is actually a sweet romantic comedy and I really ought to give it a chance, even though those people would then describe the opening sequence in detail and therefore convince me that I really didn’t want to see the damned thing. I mean, ew.
But I have mellowed, and I realized that I ought to see There’s Something About Mary even if I was not a big Farrelly brothers fan, because as a film geek I like seeing the evolution (or slow gasping death) of the comedy film. Besides, I was intrigued by everyone’s insistence that There’s Something About Mary was a sweet little romantic comedy.
They’re right. There’s Something About Mary is a sweet romantic comedy. But if that’s true, why is it that so many guys love this film and have said that it’s a must-see?
I think that There’s Something About Mary is a prime example of a subgenre of romantic comedy, one that attempts to appeal to men as well as women. Let me rephrase that. The movie attempts to appeal to stereotypical guys (aka The Guys), whereas contemporary straightforward romantic comedies (that stuff with Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock) attempt to appeal to stereotypical women (aka The Chicks).
I personally like romantic comedies that attempt to appeal to intelligent people, but those are really hard to find these days. This is why I don’t watch very many contemporary straightforward romantic comedies.
Anyway, There’s Something About Mary is a successful attempt to make a romantic comedy that The Guys would like. The filmmakers achieve this in several ways:
Lots of gross-out jokes. Because it just isn’t a good film without something hilariously icky, like the notorious zipper scene and the scene that ruined my life.
I must say There’s Something About Mary has significantly fewer gross-out jokes than I expected, and certainly fewer than Dumb and Dumber did. Trailers for this movie made it seem like most of the movie would be this kind of humor, but I suspect the trailers were aimed at The Guys.
Slightly homophobic humor. I have no idea why this type of humor keeps cropping up in these films (the most horrible example being the end of Ace Ventura), but I guess The Guys like it. The entire police sequence in this film was wholly unnecessary but The Guys got a lot of good jokes about gay men out of it, I guess that was the point. Whee.
Humor involving disabilities. It wouldn’t be a Farrelly brothers movie without mentally and physically handicapped people, right? But I have to say they treat these characters with more kindness than you might expect. Yes, there are some pretty dumb jokes, but the characters themselves are well drawn. The filmmakers manage to walk a very fine line here with surprising skill.
(The one joke in Dumb and Dumber that made me laugh was the one where they’d duct-taped the bird’s head back on and gave it to the blind guy. I know. I know. But I laughed my ass off.)
The perfect woman. Who would The Guys consider the perfect woman? She should like sports, like football. She should be physically active. She should be skinny and blonde and wear skimpy little outfits. She should be financially independent. She shouldn’t be turned off by burps and farts and Hawaiian shirts.
Cameron Diaz as Mary is not only beautiful, but she can act like one of the guys and yet remain alluring. That’s really what the “something” is about Mary boils down to, I suspect, no matter what the characters say.
Sports cameos. Brett Favre makes a brief appearance. The joke where Ben Stiller’s character can’t pronounce his last name is one of the funnier ones in this film.
My point is that There’s Something About Mary plays up all of these qualities in order to hide the fact that underneath them, the storyline is a rather sweet love story. Here we have Ben Stiller, who remembers his high-school sweetheart so fondly, and who cares about her so much, that he wants to go see her even though Matt Dillon has told him that she’s a wheelchair-bound fat unwed mother on welfare. Of course, we all know this is a lie and she’s still the lovely Cameron Diaz, but he doesn’t know that yet.
I always say I don’t like Ben Stiller in movies, but then another movie proves that I’m wrong. I liked Mystery Men although I don’t particularly like him in it, I liked him in Reality Bites although I didn’t particularly like the movie, and I liked The Royal Tenenbaums. Also, Ben Stiller is responsible for one of my favorite moments on Sesame Street ever, when he sings “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” dressed as a giant cheese. He is well cast in There’s Something About Mary—dweebish without the attendant rage we see in so many of his roles, and in fact almost appealing.
Cameron Diaz, as I said before, is lovely and appropriate and also well cast. I don’t usually like her in movies. She was my least favorite part of Charlie’s Angels. She always looks a little too bony or something, I don’t know. But I didn’t notice that in this film.
Matt Dillon is probably my favorite character in this movie, and I’m not just saying that because he resembled a cut-rate Bruce Campbell. (Seriously. With the Hawaiian shirts and all? If he lost the mustache? Think about it.) He is wonderfully sleazy but not too slimy. Chris Elliot is as good as he gets in a movie.
In fact, I think the cast is part of what made this movie work as well as it does. Disguising a romantic comedy as a Guy Film is difficult and you might notice the Farrelly brothers have not been nearly as successful with subsequent attempts (Me, Myself & Irene, Shallow Hal). We can sympathize with Ben Stiller a lot, with Cameron Diaz, and even with Matt Dillon a little. All these poor schmucks fall in love with the same woman and they will assume any disguise, do whatever is necessary, in order to win her affection. And of course it’s the one guy who doesn’t disguise himself or deceive her whom she chooses at the end. Isn’t that sweet? Awww.
Now, why did I personally like this movie? For one thing, it was consistently funny. I don’t like gross-out jokes and I wasn’t amused by watching a guy struggle with crutches but the movie had plenty of other amusing bits. The actors all had good comic timing and were charming enough for me to enjoy watching them despite some of their more repulsive characteristics. I particularly liked Jonathan Richman popping in occasionally on a tree limb to sing the title song. (I can still sing along with his “Pablo Picasso” song in Repo Man). When I think about certain parts of this movie, I am amazed that I liked it at all, but taken as a whole, There’s Something About Mary was a fun, sweet little movie.
In fact, I enjoyed it enough that when the DVD we got from Netflix turned out to be so scratched in the middle of the movie that it was skipping scenes and was essentially unwatchable, I insisted that we get in the car and go to the corner video store and rent another copy of the DVD so I could see the rest of the movie that night. (As a result, I didn’t get to see the “extended edition” that was touted on the recent rerelease of the DVD, because the video-store copy was an older release.)
There’s Something About Mary isn’t going to inspire me to watch other Farrelly brothers movies, or even other Ben Stiller movies, but I admit I liked it and I forgive them for ruining my life all those years ago. (Although I didn’t think the ejaculation scene was all that funny … except … except that the music playing over Ben Stiller’s furious last-minute masturbation was the “Gypsy Dance” music from Bizet’s Carmen, and somehow that cracked me up more than anything else in the movie. Carmen Jones, an English version of the opera, translates that song as repeating the lyrics “Beat out that rhythm on a drum.”)