A Film Canon

The Farrelly brothers have a knack for combining frat-boy crudeness with wistful, nostalgic elegance, as if updating the Lubitsch touch for a more sexually savvy demographic, or just including that savviness as the excuse for enjoying a sweetness that also seems indebted to the formulaic courtship comedies of the 50s - and There's Something About Mary remains the best vehicle for this comic signature. Perhaps that's because it deals with a figure that's equally sweet and perverse - the obsessive stalker as a sheepishly hopeless romantic, a plain nice guy - in the form of Ted (Ben Stiller), who tentatively hires private investigator Pat (Matt Dillon) to track down his high school sweetheart, Mary (Cameron Diaz). That the stalker is a figure, rather than a mere character, is suggested by the fact that every man in the film who encounters Mary feels the need to stalk her - a turn that speaks to the Farrelly brothers' irreverent reinvention of the late 80s and early 90s stalker thriller, but also offsets Ted's sweetness with a more acerbic edge, the dark side of an increasingly available array of mobile surveillance technologies. It feels like a film made on the cusp of widespread mobile phone ownership, for which there are a variety of half-formed surrogates - and it's the resultant grasping towards ever-increasing forms of proximity, as well as the improvisations of identity that they entail, that forms the real comic center of the film. As far as the more physical, sexual comedy goes, what's surprising about the Farrelly brothers is that they only seem to 'show' things - testicles caught in a zipper, semen dripping off an ear - to clarify the pleasures of euphemism, just as they invoke a variety of potentially exploitable bodies - Mary's disabled brother, her disabled architect friend, a gay orgy at a rest stop - for the sake of testing their own good-nature. For all its supposed shock value, it's a refined comedy, as sunny and atmospheric as its Miami backdrop, or the Jonathan Richman musical interludes that romantically parse the narrative, not even especially interested in shaming its most unsympathetic characters.