WhatzUp

Along Came Polly
by Derek Neff

There isn’t one single minute of Along Came Polly that hasn’t been cribbed from somewhere else. Ben Stiller reprises his role from There’s Something About Mary and Meet the Parents as the lovable straight-man to whom excruciatingly embarrassing things keep happening (this time he’s named Reuben Feffer); Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the crude, bad-advice-giving best friend whom we’ve been seeing in every romantic comedy for the past decade; Jennifer Aniston’s cutely confused Polly casually references Diane Keaton’s title role in Annie Hall; and I could swear I’ve seen Alec Baldwin doing the same gauche boss caricature he does here in a Saturday Night Live skit a year or two ago, though I could be wrong. Even the climax of the movie comes right out of at least two or three season finales of the TV show Friends. That said, I really liked Along Came Polly, and laughed a whole lot more than I was expecting to.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, writer/director John Hamburg has taken all of this tired material and cobbled it into something thematically cohesive and even pretty likeable. The gross-out aesthetic of the movie is nothing new and seems a little forced now in retrospect, though much of it had me laughing at the time. (It helps that Hoffman, as former child-star Sandy Lyle, delivers most of the movie’s funniest lines; he had me laughing the very first second he popped up on the screen, before he’d even said a word.)

After catching his wife (Debra Messing) with another man (Hank Azaria) while on their honeymoon, risk assessor Reuben Feffer returns to the city and tries to move on with his life. He runs into a classmate from junior high school at a party to which Sandy has dragged him. Polly is flirty, funny and totally averse to any form of commitment whatsoever. Initially, she can’t even commit to a date when Reuben asks her out, though somehow or other they do begin a relationship.

The story is straightforward (some would say predictable), and both characters are vivid enough to give the romance some solidity around which all the free-wheeling bad-taste comedy can sort of orbit. If it can’t exactly be said that Stiller and Aniston have great chemistry together, it should also be said that this doesn’t detract from the generally pleasant goings-on. Along Came Polly is an unchallenging comedy, nothing more, and you judge such things by a very simple and modest yardstick: by how often they make you laugh. Well, I laughed, and fairly often.