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With There's Something About Mary the clues are to be found within the directorial partnership of Peter and Bobby Farrelly; think of Dumb & Dumber and Kingpin, then take their crude trade to the next level. This latest Farrelly effort takes immense pride in lumbering across social boundaries and annihilating taboos, shocking by describing and displaying all that's offensive. Yet for all this immaturity, the film is unnervingly amusing, vulgar yet somehow sensitive. The saving grace with There's Something About Mary is that it isn't nasty or exploitative, there's no dark side to the comedy. Instead the movie exists because it can, because it's fun to put worms down a friend's back and watch them squirm.
In kicking off its twisted romance, the story begins via a troupe of high-school nerds wasting their time in Rhode Island. These are the misfits that cling together for security, as far as they're concerned, women could be aliens from another galaxy. Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) is perhaps the most conventionally attractive of the bunch but that's not putting him in line for a prize. The contrast between Ted and luminous, desirable Mary Jensen Matthews (Cameron Diaz) is something to behold. She evokes lust, he disgust. Yet when Ted steps in to protect Mary's retarded brother Warren (W. Earl Brown), he gets the opportunity to shoot for heaven. No wonder Ted's still fixated by Mary, thirteen years later.
It's pretty obvious that the writers had a stack of ideas worth incorporating into There's Something About Mary, some more successful than others. As the film rattles along, it pitches between its high points like a toy boat in the Atlantic; topping out after a slow build-up, the film becomes very funny indeed. These stomach-churning moments are something else, treading a very fine line. No doubt many will be alienated by the film's directness, yet that's the price paid for a refreshing honesty. People, folk like us, really do suffer for the sake of love and relationships, doing stuff that seems crazy to the objective observer. Oh yes, this movie captures just how dates can go spectacularly awry, spiralling out of one's control into a disaster beyond reckoning. It's the in-between bits that drag, pointless narrative bridges in a discontinuous film.
As you might expect the characters are nicely over-the-top, their dominant features exaggerated to a monstrous degree. Thus private dick Pat Healy (Matt Dillon) is a sleazy liar with terrible dress sense, Tucker (Lee Evans) an architect-pretend with rubber legs and Ted a lovelorn loser whose life amounts to nothing worth mentioning. All adore and worship at the altar of Diaz, a sports-mad, junk-food-loving stunner; she's the jock's dream made corporal. These people are fun to watch despite being so broadly scoped that the script could be written in crayon; like the plot, a frame on which to hang jokes, the roles are vehicles for gags rather than emotions. Still, by its grand finale the story pulls together quite winningly, if predictably so.
There's Something About Mary should certainly thank Christopher Greenbury, its film editor, profusely. From an episodic collection of hit and miss scenes, Greenbury carves out enough comic tension to make even the weak jokes seems great. It's not his fault that the film relies heavily on gross incidents, perhaps to its detriment; he's just working with that provided by the Farrelly brothers. Their forte is the outrageous and extreme, putting into action the thoughts that most of us have been trained to keep hidden. In this the movie is an endurance test, peppered with jokes thrashed so hard that they become funny all over again. You'll remember the best bits of There's Something About Mary, everything else will fade before you've left the seat.
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