‘Mary’: The Contrary Romantic Comedy

Nora Ephron, take a cue. The romantic comedy, as we’ve known it, just took a radical turn. And you can thank the Farrelly Brothers.

That’s right. “Dumb & Dumber” filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly have managed to attract huge female, couple and even older audiences to their 20th Century Fox film, “There’s Something About Mary”--a movie filled with gross-out gags and over-the-top sexual humor. Typically Farrelly movies are what teen males rush out to see.

But “Mary” already is being hailed as this summer’s sleeper hit; it’s grossed nearly $50 million at the box office in only 15 days, dropping a mere 8% from its first week of release.

It’s currently doing about $2 million a day, “and you can’t do that kind of business with just young guys,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. “That’s serious crossover and the crossover are women.

“At its core, ‘Mary’ is a romantic comedy cloaked in bathroom humor,” he added. “It’s disguised as a cool guy movie but the romantic comedy part definitely pulls in the girls [and] women.

“It’s just one of those movies where you laugh at the audacious stuff and then you’re embarrassed for laughing and then you glance around to see if everybody else in the theater is laughing at the raunchy, politically incorrect gags. It’s infectious. Just one big guilty pleasure.”

Well, that’s one way to put it. Another way is that the Farrelly Brothers, with their raucous, twisted--some might even say sick--sense of humor, have indeed turned the genre on its ear, moving it away from the essentially well-mannered romantic comedies of the last decade (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “While You Were Sleeping”) into raunchier territory.

“This is scary,” joked Jeff Arch, who wrote the 1993 hit “Sleepless in Seattle.” The film was directed by Ephron and starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks; that trio has re-teamed for another in the upcoming “You’ve Got Mail.”

“They so effectively brutalized the [genre], how do you ever top that? They just lambasted what we do,” Arch said. “You know this kind of romantic comedy is like taking your 13-year-old daughter to a concert backstage before she sees the show. You don’t want her to see what’s really going on before she gets there.”

He’s referring here, of course, to some of “Mary’s” more outrageous--and much howled about--scenes, one involving a zipper and another bad hair gel. (Sorry, we can’t give specifics here.) It’s hard to imagine scenes like that in earlier mainstream comedies, but not hard to imagine them in future ones.

“Positively. Look for more [romantic comedies] like this to come,” said an executive with Warner Bros. who, among others interviewed for this story, believes American taste--or at least tolerance--for crasser material has loosened somewhat.

“ ‘Mary’ is all over the place. It cuts across all demographics.” And that, the executive added, spells box-office magic.

But that’s only if “ ‘Mary’s’ would-be successors can manage to walk the same tightrope,” Dergarabedian noted. “This movie was lightning in a bottle. If [the Farrellys] had gone just a little bit more to the left or to the right with the wrong cast, it could have come off really cheesy and then it would have been a big flop. That’s the trick . . . balancing that fine line.”

Among the keys to the film’s success, especially with women: an appealing lead actress (Cameron Diaz) and its central story of love lost and found.

But that line is a thin one, exhibitors agree. “Whenever a movie works and it works well, you can expect a change [in the genre],” said Brian Callahan, spokesman for General Cinema. But he added that for the small Middle America theater chain the success of future efforts along the Farrelly vein will boil down to one thing: complaints.

“With ‘Mary’ I haven’t heard any complaints. Not a one,” noted Dave Sharp, who runs Film Services Group, a Salt Lake City-based chain of 65 theaters in Utah, Colorado and Nevada. “I don’t get to count noses. I don’t ever hear praise, only complaints. So when I don’t hear complaints I know the film is working. Quite frankly, I expected to hear them on this one.

“As to why women are liking this? Who knows? My guess is, Mary’s the lead character and she’s a bone surgeon. And the other woman in the film [Magda] is a great character. Who can forget her and that hair? I used to think you’d only find those hairdos in Montana where they have to outlaw ceiling fans. It’s good to know they’re in Florida too. Maybe it’s the hair thing.”

Seriously though, Bobby Farrelly, 40, believes there is a legit lure for older women as well as couples.

“You know there were just too many people our age that had lost interest in comedies. Hey, we’re guilty of it,” he said in an interview this week. “All of them were [skewed] young. We [he and Peter] felt like the adult comedy was something the studios had given up on.

“Hey, we didn’t sit around and analyze this stuff, but basically it just seemed like romantic comedies in the last couple of years had just become too predictable. There was that movie with George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer [Fox’s “One Fine Day”] that came out and you knew in the first 10 minutes they were going to get together in the end. They just didn’t have enough obstacles.

“That’s it. All these romantic comedies just don’t have enough obstacles. We just sorta have our own brand of obstacles. And we just take them from real life.” (A version of the zipper scene did happen to a friend of his sister’s after a spin-the-bottle game, he confessed.)

Gross humor is not unique to the Farrellys, of course. Another outrageous comedy, “BASEketball,” opened Friday, but unlike “Mary,” that film has male leads (“South Park” dudes Trey Parker and Matt Stone), and instead of romance, sports is the central theme.

And Farrelly points out that you can’t get away from the fact that there’s something about Mary for everyone.

“Look, Mary’s the perfect girl. Drinks beer. Plays golf. Loves sports. She’s smart. She’s pretty. She’s nice and she likes everybody, even geeky guys. She’s got a retarded brother.”

Plus, Farrelly added: “We like stories about guys who lose out on opportunity.”

Tom Sherak, chairman of Fox’s Domestic Film Group, summed up the appeal of “Mary” like this: “Why do women and couples like it? Hmmm. Well, the premise is nerdy guys want the pretty girl. That’s life. It’s bold. It’s crass. That’s life.

“The key character in the movie is a woman. She’s a Middle America 10. And the name of the movie has . . . helllooo . . . a woman’s name in the title. Mary. Get it?”