Written and Directed by John Hamburg

---CAST:
Ben Stiller Reuben Pfeffer
Jennifer Aniston Polly Prince
Debra Messing Lisa Kramer
Phillip Seymour Hoffman Sandy
Alec Baldwin Stan Andurksy
Hank Azaria Claude
Bryan Brown Leland Van Lew
Michelle Lee Vivian Pfeffer
Bob Dishy Irving Pfeffer

Running time: Approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Scheduled release date: January 16, 2004.

There’s a message somewhere in Along Came Polly about the need for taking risk, a message that’s not exactly new, but which could’ve been pulled off had a better-written character arc been given to Ben Stiller, the modern everyman who excels at exploring the awkwardness in everyday situations like meeting future in-laws or dealing with annoying neighbors. Ironically, in a film about the need for risk-taking, the plot plays it safe by concerning it self more with hygiene and excrement jokes than with the conflict between Stiller and the livin’-it-up girl that supposedly loosens him up.

Stiller plays Reuben Pfeffer, a risk analysis expert who makes a living assessing various risks in life for people looking for insurance, and who lives his life playing it safe, keeping everything from spicy foods to contact sports at arm’s length. He gets married to Lisa Kramer (Debra Messing) in the beginning of the film, and after the honeymoon ends in disaster, a chance encounter with free-spirited childhood friend Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston, looking gorgeous as ever), leads him to venture out and try some of those things in life he’s always avoided.

This could’ve been a fun premise if only the story followed the rule that change to a character should come as a result of his experiences in the film, and not before. Usually in films where a wimp or stiff character is paired off with a free spirit that results in the stiff loosening up, the two people are thrown together by forces outside their control (a cop or fed escorting a prisoner, a citizen enlisted to help an adventurer, a total stranger forced to help someone on the run), and kept together against their own volition, so that the tension arising from their differences serves as the basis for their friendship, and if they’re a guy and a girl, a pretext for their attraction. Here, no outside force brings Reuben and Polly together, nor is there any real obstacle keeping them from making a connection, so one has to wonder what the conflict is. The film makes too easy on them. Despite initial skittishness, Reuben asks Polly out, and ends up eating Indian food that doesn’t go well with his Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which suggests right there that he is already moving beyond his risk-free outlook on life of his own volition, even though that’s what his relationship with Polly is ideally supposed to do. Perhaps sensing this problem, writer John Hamburg tries to set up pseudo-obstacles to this process, like having Reuben initially chickening out of calling her only to show up at her apartment a day later, or having Polly agree to go out with him, then waffling, and then going out with him anyway, but these plot points come off as forced, artificial, and add nothing to the plot or the character interaction. In this way, it fails for the same reason that Adam Sandler’s Anger Management did, except that instead of anger, it’s fear of risk, with the main character already exhibiting the sort of “betterment” behavior that he’s supposed to be showing at the end of the story.

Any sense of conflict in their relationship is glossed over. He ruins her $200 luffa and a towel embroidered by her grandmother, but she calls him the next day anyway because…well, just because. He becomes jealous of another guy’s relationship with Polly, but it’s quickly and easily cleared up, and used as another way for Reuben to better himself, without any exploration of the inherent humor in the situation. Polly finds out that Reuben is still married to Lisa, but then goes out with him again anyway. She finds a risk assessment list on his computer comparing her to Lisa that he made to help him decide which one of them to stay with, but she doesn’t freak out, a reaction in stark contrast to the one her character had when she found out that Ross did the same exact thing in a second season episode of Friends. When the movie does need them to experience their Obligatory Temporary Breakup, it has Polly tell Reuben that they were just having a fling, a statement that, in light of her eventual getting back together with him at the end of the film, could be attributed to fear of commitment, but which the movie never clearly indicates, leaving the viewer to wonder what’s going on with her. Does she love him or not?

One almost senses that there was some other film in here edited out of the final cut, and indeed, some of the editing in the film seems a bit odd. In one scene, Reuben appears to bump into something fragile near the stage when salsa dancing, but we don’t see what it is, and the scene cuts away, without showing any real destruction that could be milked for humor. Consider that after Polly finds out about Lisa, Reuben and Polly decide to go out to dinner, and Polly insists that she get to pick the place to eat, which is odd, since she’s picked every place they’ve eaten throughout the film, and this despite the fact that she now knows about Reuben’s Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Were there scenes with the two of them in restaurants of Reuben’s choice, perhaps serving really boring food that was left on the cutting room floor?

There’s the usual obsession with scatological and hygiene humor so popular right now, which the audience two nights ago seemed to love, and the usual stock characters, such as Reuben’s meddling mom (Michelle Lee), best friend Sandy (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a washed-up former child actor hoping for a comeback, and Stan Andursky, Reuben’s pig of a boss, played by a gravely-voiced-for-no-reason Alec Baldwin, whose attitude toward hygiene and good taste is to Reuben’s sensitivities what the iceberg was to the Titanic. Hell, there’s even a Silent Bob character who dispenses some sagely wisdom at the end of the film after heretofore blending into the wallpaper.

If you think that I’m giving away some shocking plot twists, here, then perhaps you haven’t seen many movies, and shouldn’t be reading my reviews.

---NITS:
At one point, Ruben is in Polly’s bathroom, trying to unclog the toilet with a $200 luffa, after having used an embroidered towel to wipe his backside when the toilet paper ran out, praying out loud for the water level in the toilet to go down. Well, it’s not going to go down Ruben, so long as the d@mn towel is stuck in the trapway hole, you know! Of course the water is going to continue rising until it spills out of the toilet!

HBO is running this film this month. Personally, I thought it was trying to be There's Something About Mary II. Maybe it was edited that way, or cut to fit a predetermined running time, I don't know.
Spoiler Alert (highlight to read): Reuben's wife cheats on him, on their honeymoon no less (this propels the plot, mind you.) I applaud that at the end of the film, he doesn't take her back.