Along Came Polly

Along Came Polly

I will never eat free nuts from a bar bowl again after seeing “Along Came Polly.” Not once expert risk-assessor Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller) has told you who’s handled them before, what they’ve been through and where, for all we know, they’re coming from. He knows the hazards of any situation which is why his marriage seems like such a safe bet. His new bride Lisa (Debra Messing) is basically a computer printout of an ideal life partner. But things don’t work out like that in “Along Came Polly,” where lots of things don’t work out including, alas, the movie itself.

On the second day of their honeymoon in St. Barts, Lisa cheats on Reuben with a muscle-bound scuba instructor (Hank Azaria), and he returns to New York devastated. When he meets Polly (Jennifer Aniston), an old junior high classmate, he doesn’t think they can be happy together (the two have nothing in common: assessing the risks, he sees them as 100 percent incompatible), but much to his surprise they find themselves in a neurotic but not uneventful relationship.

And therein lies the problem: Their relationship indeed every single one of Reuben’s friendships and business associations is implausible not in an amusing way but in an irritating way: We keep thinking there’s no way this person would act this way under these circumstances. What sort of risk assessor is Reuben if he knows he has irritable bowel syndrome and still takes Polly to dinner at a Moroccan spice palace on their first date?

Yes, his dinner provides the movie with occasion for one of those extended sequences involving spectacular digestive, eliminatory and regurgitative adventures that films sometimes use when they want to clear the theater. But we know it’s all just an elaborate setup. Embarrassment may be funny when it happens to you by accident or misfortune, but it’s not funny when you go looking for it.

As for the Polly character, let’s just say that the risk of her ever falling in love with a guy like Reuben is astronomical. What would attract her? His constipated personality? Low self-esteem? Workaholism? Neurotic inability to have fun without planning carefully?

She’s a free spirit who lives in one of those apartments that look like they were decorated by an overenthusiastic department store window designer during a brief but intense infatuation with an old Sandy Dennis movie. Her favorite pastime is salsa dancing, which comes close to being virtual sex for her especially with her favorite partner Javier (Jsu Garcie). Reuben, who can’t dance and won’t try, is jealous of Javier until he signs up for salsa lessons himself a potentially hilarious situation that isn’t.

There’s just not much here that’s funny. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman as Sandy, Reuben’s best friend and best man; he’s a former child star who now makes his living letting strangers tell him how amazed they are that he’s still alive, and his response to this in an early scene is a small masterpiece of facial melodrama. But how many times does he have to slip and fall on slippery floors before we get tired of it? I’ll give him this much: He definitely knows what a fat man looks like in a red cummerbund from a discount tuxedo rental agency.

Lately, Alec Baldwin has done many commendable things (like his role in “The Cooler”), and he is also Reuben’s boss, the agency director, and a smooth operator who gives a wedding toast that skates around vulgarity with such skill it ought to get a medal. He sends Reuben off to find some way of insuring the high risk Leland Van Lew (Bryan Brown), which only sets up more Fish Out of Water scenes. In fact, Reuben’s fish is so consistently out of water that after a while we wish it were smoked.

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