Review
ALONG CAME POLLY
Starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston and Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Written and directed by John Hamburg
Opens Friday, January 16
Check listings
What’s a good Jewish boy to do when he walks in on his wife screwing the scuba instructor… on his honeymoon? In Along Came Polly, the new film from writer-director John Hamburg, the answer is let loose and prepare for even more humiliation. As in Meet the Parents, which Hamburg also wrote, Along Came Polly delights in putting a well-meaning, good-natured character embodied by Ben Stiller through the proverbial relationship wringer. And although Polly doesn’t think up anything as funny as a character named Gaylord Focker, it provides the requisite amount of potty humour and awkward dating faux pas.
Stiller stars as Reuben Feffer, a painfully responsible insurance risk analyst who’s spent his life sticking to a plan. When his wife of a few days (a whiny Debra Messing) runs off with a French scuba instructor (played by Hank Azaria, who does an even more annoying accent than he did in The Birdcage), Reuben’s carefully orchestrated life falls apart. When he returns to Manhattan, sans his new wife, he must face the horrors of single life once again.
His gruff boss (played by a hefty Alec Baldwin), merely offers his prodigal employee a series of off-colour one-liners about women, so Reuben takes some not-so-smart advice from his childhood buddy, Sandy (Philip Seymour Hoffman). A former child star who now spends his days loafing around, Sandy is all vulgarity and reckless abandon. Hoffman, with his potbelly sticking out, delights at the opportunity to play another self-absorbed, out-of-touch, idiot. Whether hucking bricks on the basketball court or prancing around in tight sweatpants as Judas in a community theater production of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hoffman’s antics are amusing, if not overwritten.
Offering less to the comedy, Jennifer Aniston stars as the object of Reuben’s misguided affections. A scatter-brained, wild child, Aniston’s Polly is a free spirit who indvertently pulls Reuben into very uncharted waters. Whether encouraging him to try ethnic food (which upsets his case of irritable bowel syndrome) or salsa dancing (which upsets his basic understanding of gravity), Polly strives to loosen up her tightly wound risk assessment honey with mixed results.
Like Meet the Parents, Along Came Polly is little more than a series of humiliations one man suffers for, and at the hands of, the woman he loves. But unlike Parents, Polly focuses on the area below the belt with plenty of the jokes originating or ending in the bathroom. For those who can’t get enough jokes about bowel movements, enjoy! For everyone else, be warned. |
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