Release Date: January 16, 2004
Starring: Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Hank Azaria, Debra Messing
Directed by: John Hamburg
Written by: John Hamburg
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual content, language, crude humor, some drug references)
I feel like I’ve seen Along Came Polly before, although I get that feeling about a lot of movies released in January or August and if I have, somehow, I suppose it’s best that I can’t remember it. Polly, which is written and directed by John Hamburg, is a quickie romantic comedy that operates in shorthand. As the audience, we know, for example, that Ben Stiller is a geeky Jewish guy, that Philip Seymour Hoffman is screwy and Alec Baldwin is sleazy, that Jennifer Aniston is a babe (though kind of a flaky one), and that Hank Azaria is, well, whatever the director wants him to be. But we do not know whether there was a really good romantic comedy to be had here, because as soon as the director sends us the message that this film is on autopilot, so are we, content to while away the next 100 minutes halfheartedly dispensing courtesy laughs like tourists throwing fish to the dolphins at Sea World.
Let it be said, at least, that Stiller, Hoffman, Baldwin, Azaria, and even Aniston are all comically talented actors, and if this film deserves any surpassing praise it is for the producers who crammed all of them into the same movie. Incumbent with their presence is the guarantee of at least a handful of good scenes, just as when Nolan Ryan was pitching you knew you’d see some strikeouts.
Stiller plays Reuben Feffer, the top insurance risk assessor at the firm of Indursky & Sons. It’s a job he’s come into by playing things safe, so no wonder when, as a newlywed, his boss (Baldwin) says he’d insure Reuben’s marriage any day of the week. But on his honeymoon in the Caribbean, Reuben walks in on his wife (Debra Messing) having sex with a philandering scuba instructor (Azaria); crushed, he returns home to New York City single and alone. His best friend, an actor named Sandy Lyle (Hoffman), is little to no help, as he’s wrapped up in his own fading stardom, but things take a turn for the better when Reuben meets Polly Prince (Aniston) at a dinner party. The two knew each other in the seventh grade, and Reuben decides to ask her on a date, but it turns out that Polly is nearly the exact opposite of Reuben: she’s flighty, afraid of commitment, and more than a little eccentric.
Thus begins the usual Hollywood charade that passes for romantic comedy nowadays, with scenes between Polly and Reuben spliced between scenes of Reuben and Sandy talking about the scenes with Polly and Reuben. It all builds up to a predictable finale, but the ending isn’t the reason people go to see these movies; it’s the jokes, which, in this case, are about 50-50.
Stiller, who can do neurosis like nobody since Woody Allen, is unfortunately hamstrung as the film’s punching bag; Hamburg’s script puts Reuben in lots of awkward positions like having to plunge a toilet with everything except a toilet plunger or suffering through a spicy meal despite having irritable bowel syndrome. His male costars outshine him by several orders of magnitude: Hoffman hams it up as the no-help best friend (who is, quite possibly, the worst basketball player ever), and Baldwin seems to have stepped right off the set of his last picture, The Cooler, in delivering his throaty, goony turn as Reuben’s boss Stan. Even Azaria, who has perhaps five minutes of screen time all told, makes a bigger impact than Stiller.
Stiller doesn’t generate any chemistry with Aniston, either, though it doesn’t appear to be his fault; she has fizzled in previous pairings with Jim Carrey and Mark Wahlberg, as though after a decade performing on sitcom television she doesn’t know what to do when she has to interact with someone for longer than the eight minutes between commercial breaks. Luckily, though, her Polly owns a ferret, which audiences will recognize as a universally reliable comic crutch; this particular rodent is also completely blind, so that it runs into things like poles and garbage cans at terrific speed and with a satisfyingly loud, metallic thump in almost every scene it has. But though Polly and Reuben eventually work over their differences and come together in the final act, Stiller and Aniston are like the proverbial ships passing in the night; even the requisite fight they have to go through (after Polly discovers that Reuben chose her over his estranged wife because a risk assessment computer told him she was the safer bet) seems like a half-hearted waste of screen time.
There is a fair amount of obscene and sometimes grotesque bodily humor in Polly, enough to make me wonder whether the Farrelly brothers were on set as creative consultants. In truth it probably would’ve worked better if they’d directed the film, because the results would’ve been inevitably closer to There’s Something About Mary than this generic outing. Audiences may complain that the movies are too scatological as it is, but this isn’t true; I’d much rather see poop on the screen than pay for it at the box office.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)