There's Something About Mary Review
by Omar Odeh (helmut AT sprint DOT ca)January 22nd, 1999
In a very thorough document released earlier this year, 4 classifications of movie theater laughter were described. (1) The quiet chuckle of the pretentious film-geek (and non-professional stand-up comic); usually delivered off-time and only once or twice in any given film. (2) The nervous laughter of the dollar-book cinephile; as much an indication of confusion as of appreciating humour, again delivered only rarely. (3) The loud and abrupt laughter of the non-professional actor; this is used most often to allude to a subtle appreciation for the nuances of failed acting that such an individual has become expert in. This by far the most common of the four. (4) The pure laugh; an ecstatic and joyous release that defies characterisation and is issued by anyone who has truly been placed in the presence of good humour. (Easily the least common sound in theaters). It was surly partly in response to this document that There's Something About Mary by Peter and Bobby Farelly ws brought into being. And just in case I haven't been as clear as I thought I was being: this film is funny. It is as though the Farelly brothers made a list of every single joke that could never be told in a commercial film and then built a script out of them. And yet although no one will accuse Mary of converging with the wit and intelligence of Woody Allen, the film is nonetheless closer to Sleeper than The Naked Gun. The Farelly brothers have intuitively offered a careful and elegant deconstruction of the romantic comedy and clothed it in the juvenile, though undeniably pleasurable veneer of the screwball. If we have to have a commercial cinema (and I am not convinced that we do) then we can only hope more people like the Farelly brothers find their way to it's helm.
There's Something About Mary is the story of the perfect all-American girl (Cameron Diaz as Mary) and the men competing for her affections (centred around Ben Stiller as Ted). Although their has been much talk about the over-the-top humour, the real interest of the film, comedic and otherwise, is the careful satirizing of the romantic comedy genre. As such, the bodily function humour and other pure laugh generating devices are simply a support to this overarching framework. A first element of this framework is the narrative itself. The proceedings end up taking the viewer through every known cliché of the boy-meets-girl variety. We are left in no doubt as to the many shortcomings of these male pursuants (Ted included) and yet the ultimate failure of the film is Mary's in refusing to be discouraged or even acknowledge these shortcomings. It is this absurd persistence towards some kind of coupling against mountains of evidence as to the worthlessness of such a pursuit that signals, on a first level, the intentional satirizing of the classic romantic comedy. (still being replicated today by such notables as Ed Burns and Rob Reiner [two filmmakers whose greatest difference is their weight]) The Farelly brothers draw further attention to their, seemingly conventional design, with singing interludes that usually disclose non-diegetic music as directly coming from an on-screen band. These types of devices (dollar-book distancing devices at best) nonetheless expose the narrative as suspect and as a vehicle of satire as opposed to the more conventional gratification that comes from straight comedy. It is tempting to suggest that they are at least tenuously linked somehow to the sung credit sequence that opens Pasolini's Hawks and Sparrows (although the latter is in territory that Mary can only dare to dream may exist).
The real function of the Farelly's brand of humour then is as a support to their satire. Part of the reason the sight gags and other jokes (like the 'loaded gun' speech) are so funny is that they play on a host of the established preconceptions viewers hold. Notions of beauty, propriety and desirability are savagely beat down by the gags used. Just consider your favourite gag from the film and this becomes clear. The real skill of Mary, however is in the ambiguous characterisations. This does not mean the lies that are exposed throughout the film but the actual ambiguity the Farelly's show: when Dillon's character refers to mentally handicapped people as "goofy bastards" in an attempt to impress Mary, it is hilarious because he himself is unaware of how awkward what he is saying is. Treatments such as these are truly deft filmmaking unlike the inane and simplistic cookie-cutting of a film like Saving Private Ryan. The end result of Mary is a very unique spectator relationship that is more than a little demanding of viewers. It is perhaps this awkwardness that has led to most people passing the film off as a curiosity or just an extremely funny film. Mary seems to in fact go much farther than this in that the Something of the title can just as easily be read in a pejorative as opposed to laudatory light. This is best exemplified by the 'mock happy ending' of the film which is in fact the greatest criticism of Mary that the film can level at her.
All this is surly giving the Farelly brothers too much credit. Maybe so. But Maybe not; the intentions of any director cannot be disputed in any review, but the material of the film itself can. I don't doubt that much of the complexity that Mary achieves was crafted intuitively, using the undermining of general societal values as the only real guide. None-the-less, the result is a well crafted, even elegant film that far exceeds a number of other more prominent pretenders that have been released thus far this year.
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-Omar Odeh
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3920
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