Operation Screenshot (Films of the 2000s): Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

There's (Still) Something About Mary

I find it especially hard to believe that it has been ten years since The Farrelly Brothers unleashed There’s Something About Mary on American audiences, but it has indeed been just over a decade since this extremely influential film hit American theaters in July of 1998.



I was at a particularly strange place in my life in 1998 and perhaps a lot of the warm and nostalgic feelings I have for The Farrelly Brothers most iconic film has to do with how much unbelievably joy it gave me during that particularly dark summer and fall. I find that viewing the film now is like having a secret rendezvous with a past love or an old friend, and the feelings I have watching There’s Something About Mary all these years later are that potent joyousness with more than a little bittersweet sadness mixed in for good measure.



Although they have been overtaken by the Apatow comedic machine this decade, The Farrelly Brothers ruled American Comedy on the big screen in the mid to late nineties and There’s Something About Mary was their greatest triumph, an R-rated comedy that managed to gross nearly 200 million dollars domestically along with being given the seal of approval by the majority of the critical establishment. It was quite a feat for the brothers from Rhode Island and, while many might question me stating this, I think There’s Something About Mary is one of the most influential of all modern American films, as every comedy that has come since that has attempted to mix heart with gross out humor (namely everything from Old School to Knocked Up) has owed something to The Farrelly Brothers' story about a lonely guy named Ted, and his memory of the girl from high school named Mary that he just can’t let slip away.



The Farrelly Brothers had made two films before There’s Something About Mary, 1994’s Dumb and Dumber and 1996’s Kingpin. Dumb and Dumber got its share of acclaim although it was dismissed in many quarters. It became an instant cult film though and marked The Farrellys as a team to watch. The incredibly funny Kingpin sealed their reputation as being at the forefront of a new and distinctly American comedic movement, and it made There’s Something About Mary one of the most anticipated American comedies since Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot thirty years earlier.



While the title is There’s Something about Mary, the film is really about the lovably lost dreamer Ted Stroehmann, and in Ben Stiller The Farrelly Brothers found their ideal leading man. Funny, handsome, a good actor and a filmmaker himself Stiller was made to play Ted and it remains one of his most effective and completely winning performances.




Stiller in place, The Farrelly’s found an inconceivable number of valuable and talented actors to fill out the rest of the cast including Matt Dillon (giving one of his career best performances as the sleazy private eye Pat Healy), Lee Evans as Tucker, Chris Elliot as Dom, Markie Post and Keith David as Mary’s parents and in smaller roles, the unforgettable Jeffrey Tambor and just on the cusp of her own important career, Sarah Silverman.



While it may be hard to remember now, there was a time when the woman chosen to play Mary was one of the most promising young actors in America. After making a huge splash with her debut in 1994’s The Mask, Cameron Diaz surprisingly stepped out of the spotlight and shot a series of smaller independent films, including 1995’s bitter satire The Last Supper and the underrated Feeling Minnesota in 1996. She returned to high profile pictures with 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding and was, when she shot There’s Something About Mary, one of the most beloved and acclaimed young actors in America.
Cameron Diaz was the only choice to play Mary in 1998 and her delightful turn as the girl that no guy can forget is at times moving and never less than hysterical.



Cast in place, the film shot for a budget of 23 million dollars in a number of Florida, Rhode Island and Maryland locations in the early part of 1998. Fox, after seeing an early cut, felt they had a hit on their hands and rather ingeniously set up a national sneak preview a week before its regular release to get word of mouth going…it was a choice that paid off big time for everyone involved.



It was at one of these sneaks in Lexington, Ky. where I saw the film for the first time and it is to this day one of the funniest and most joyous communal experiences of my life. Seated next to my movie buddy David and with a sold out audience in attendance, The Farrelly’s Brothers film simply killed and the infectiously hilarious and sweet mood the film set, from its opening scenes of Jonathan Richman and his drummer basically being introduced as a two man Greek Chorus to the festive closing credit sequence where the cast and crew sing along to “Build me up Buttercup”, never let up. There’s Something About Mary captured something in the air that summer of 1998 and its impact was great on the millions, like myself, that it touched.



Throughout the week after that preview it seemed like everyone was talking about the film. Critical reaction was equally as enthusiastic with everyone from hard to please critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum to Kenneth Turan singing its praises. There were some hold outs like David Denby but for the most part There’s Something About Mary was a stunning success for a genre that hardly ever gets the respect it deserves. Not surprisingly the film was ignored at Oscar time although it did garner some other awards and nominations that year, including two Golden Globe nods.



I could go on and on about what it was that touched, and continues to touch, me about the story, the music and film of There’s Something About Mary but finally what it came to in that summer of 98 was that the film gave me some much needed relief. It made me laugh, and it made me feel joyously alive the way only a true masterful comedy can. I appreciated it then and I appreciate it even more now…because we all know that America in 2008 is a much darker place than 1998 was.



Despite never scaling the heights of critical and popular favor again the way they did with There’s Something About Mary, The Farrelly Brothers have continued to do really fine work. I actually think there charming Nick Hornby adaptation Fever Pitch from 2005 might be there finest film but it didn’t have the same kind of phenomenal cultural backing There’s Something About Mary did.
The film’s stars have all done fine work as well in the past ten years. Matt Dillon won a long deserved Oscar a couple of years back for Crash (2006), Jeffrey Tambor became a legend with his turn as George Bluth Sr. on the much missed series Arrested Development and Sarah Silverman has become one of the most important and successful comics in America.



And what of Ted and Mary? Ben Stiller has proven a force in front of the screen in the decade since There’s Something About Mary, and now with the audacious and absolutely genius Tropic Thunder he has become one of our most intelligent and daring filmmakers.



The career of Cameron Diaz has been, for lack of a better term, a disappointment but she's still got talent to burn and remains one of the most infectiously charming actresses on the planet. Mary remains her greatest role and in a way Cameron Diaz is forever frozen in my mind as Mary.



There’s Something About Mary is available in a terrific two disc version and while I am sure everyone here has seen it, give it another look if it has been awhile. While some of its more daring humor for the time might seem slightly dated now, due to how far Apatow and the like have taken modern American Comedy, There’s Something About Mary has lost none of its resonance or sweetness…it’s a potent snapshot of a dreamer a few years before a lot of us lost the dream.

Operation Screenshot (Films of the Nineties) David O. Russell's Flirting with Disaster (1996)

Overlooked Classics: Permanent Midnight (1998)

I first saw David Veloz’s Permanent Midnight during its brief theatrical run in the late summer of 1998. It was in Louisville and I was with an ex-girlfriend named Casey. Al I remember is that she got up half way through the movie to make a phone call and that I liked but didn’t love the film. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that night that it would be a work I would return to over and over again during the past ten years.

Honestly, the real reason I remember wanting to see Permanent Midnight was due to Maria Bello, an actress that I had really become bewitched by during her stint on E.R. as Dr. Del Amico. The film marked Bello’s first role after that show, which marks it as the big screen start to what I think is a very special career…but more on Bello later.

A couple of years went by before I watched Veloz’s film again, this time courtesy of its DVD. I liked it more but it still didn’t totally captivate me and I didn’t expect to watch it again. I still to this day can’t put my finger on when Permanent Midnight became one of my ‘go to movies’. Sometimes it just happens that way…a movie goes from being just one you like to suddenly being one you love and watch over an over again, and that’s what happened with me and Permanent Midnight.

For those who haven’t seen it or aren’t aware of it, Permanent Midnight is based on the memoirs of Jerry Stahl, a Hollywood screenwriter who spiraled out of control in the eighties due to heroin addiction. Playing Stahl, in a career best performance, is an actor more known for his great comedic work rather than his dramatic chops, Ben Stiller. It is in fact Stiller’s wit that separates Permanent Midnight from almost any other drug movie ever made, and I think elevates it from a great film to one of the key films of the late nineties.

Early on into Permanent Midnight’s incredibly short running time (it clocks in just over 80 minutes without credits) we are treated to a brief snatch of the classic "Young Man Blues". It’s not the version by The Who but is instead the original by jazz great Mose Allison. While we only hear a few seconds of it, and it is just one of several powerful songs featured, I can’t hear the song now without seeing images of Ben Stiller in this film…lonely, lost, willfully destructive but with something obviously good inside of him.

I can’t completely put my finger on what it is that I love so much about Permanent Midnight. There is just something just significant and sincere about it…and something remarkably plain. As much as I admire the shock value of drug films from The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) to Requiem For A Dream (2000), it is the casual annihilation that Permanent Midnight manages to capture that I find so incredibly captivating.

Permanent Midnight remains the only film directed by Veloz and that’s a real surprise as it’s a really smashing debut work. Veloz, probably best known as the co-screenwriter on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, doesn’t make any of the mistakes most first time directors do and his first film is a refreshingly economical, humorous and moving take on one of the most difficult subjects to capture on film.

A remarkable cast of often surprising choices including Bello, Elizabeth Hurley, Owen Wilson, Jay Paulson, Janeane Garofalo, Cheryl Ladd, Connie Nielson and Fred Willard fill out the film, and they all deliver some of their finest work here. As the women in Stahl’s life, Bello is really touching as Kitty, the recovering addict he meets up with to recall his story to and Hurley has never been better, giving a rich and textured performance suggesting she might have developed into a really great actress. The real scene stealers though are Wilson, who manages to be funny, touching and disturbing all at once and a ferocious Connie Nielson who features in one of the film’s most unforgettable and strangest scenes to Hooverphonic’s "2 Wicky".

The film belongs, rightfully so, to Stiller though who is an absolute revelation as the spiraling screenwriter. It’s a tough role that would have been made completely unlikable by most of the ‘great’ dramatic actors who might have been cast in it, but Stiller plays it with a extraordinarily relaxed ease that even in the films harshest moments there is still something about him we like. Of course the key to Permanent Midnight isn’t necessarily liking Jerry Stahl but instead understanding him and by the end of the film, when he speaks of how hard the drudgery of daily life is compared to the life of an addict, anyone who has ever experienced even a slight taste of what he is talking about will nod their head in sad agreement.

Even though Stahl’s story is set in the eighties, Permanent Midnight is an absolutely nineties work. From the pulsing strains of Prodigy’s ferocious "Smack By Bitch Up" to the unforgettable sun soaked photography by frequent Wes Anderson collaborator Robert D. Yeoman, Permanent Midnight belongs to the decade that produced it which I suspect might date it for some but will only continue to make it resonate more with me.

Despite being a best selling book, the film version of Permanent Midnight never really caught fire. Critically it was fairly well received but hardly anyone went and saw it (it ended up grossing just over a million) and I don’t think it’s had any real kind of cult build up since its release on DVD. It lacks the flash of something like Requiem For A Dream and belongs instead with a movie like Harold Becker’s devastating The Boost (1988), another little seen ‘drug’ film that manages to capture the manic and powerful pull of addiction.

The DVD can be found fairly cheaply and it features an engaging commentary with Veloz and a couple of funny deleted scenes (including one favorite that chronicles Stahl’s time with Hustler). I think the film demands repeated viewings, which is something that I suspect most haven’t given it. I have introduced it to a few people over the years but I haven’t met anyone who engages with it as much as I do so I would be curious to hear other reactions.

Jerry Stahl published another well-received book last year, a collection of short stories called Love Without, and I hope he is doing well. I have no idea what his reactions are to the movie version (in which he has a cameo in) of his rather harrowing time are, but Permanent Midnight remains one of my favorite films of the late nineties…I hope it finds more of an audience someday.