Along Came Polly (2004)

Along Came Polly arrived in January of 2004, a romantic comedy from writer-director John Hamburg, and it did the thing that romantic comedies of that era did: it placed Ben Stiller in a series of humiliating situations and let the audience watch. Reuben Feffer assesses risk for an insurance company. He marries the wrong woman, loses her to a naked scuba instructor, and then meets Jennifer Aniston's Polly, a free spirit who eats street food and dances salsa. The film opened at number one in the United States and made a great deal of money. Critics were less generous, and the toilet humor has not aged into anything resembling grace.

The cultural inventory here is thin to the point of austerity. The cast is white, and the one Hispanic presence, Javier, exists to dance provocatively and teach our hero the salsa, a function rather than a character. Polly is independent and unbothered by convention, which is a pleasant trait and also the entire extent of the film's gender politics. Nobody discusses race, class, or the environment. The subplot about insuring a reckless CEO is played for laughs and never once suggests that the arrangement of wealth might be a problem. The jokes about anatomy and about Reuben's irritable bowel are aimed squarely at the body, and they land as mockery.

There is no sermon here, and that is the one thing this film does with total consistency. It does not lecture, moralize, or instruct. It simply wants to show a man falling off a jet ski. In that narrow ambition it succeeds, and we are left to file the result accordingly, with the mild fatigue of an archivist who has seen this exact comedy many times before.