Pale imitation
Mark Steyn
There are no new jokes, only old jokes in new form. So the problem with The Sweetest Thing isn't that you've seen every comic situation in the movie before, but that you've seen them done so much better before. For film archaeologists a thousand years hence, The Sweetest Thing will be a fascinating document, virtually a masterclass in how to kill any comic premise stone dead. The script by Nancy M. Pimental (South Park) is not good but it requires the
expertly inept direction of Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions) to make it truly bad.
It is, of course, a high-concept movie, which is to say a low concept: the chick flick meets the gross-out comedy. Straightto-video semen gags but with A-list babes! Cameron Diaz is the star. She's a game gal, as we all know from There's Something About Mary and as was evident from My Best Friend's Wedding, where Julia Roberts got top-billing but frumped about standing on her dignity leaving what little fizz the movie had on the distaff side in the hands of Miss Diaz. If you've never seen her before, The Sweetest Thing is like a karaoke medley of her greatest hits. If you enjoyed her shaking her caboose on the dance floor in Charlie's Angels, she does it again here. If you enjoyed her doing an impromptu song in a restaurant in My Best Friend's Wedding, she does it again here. If you enjoyed her in There's Something About Mary, virtually every single joke in the movie has its pale imitation here.
I wouldn't be surprised if the first draft was titled There's Something About Peter. That's the slender plot, or pretext. Miss Diaz and Christina Applegate play Christina and Courtney. two major 'players' on the boy-girl scene who can't commit and couldn't care less. As Christina advises her friend Jane (Selma Blair), 'Don't go looking for Mister Right. Look for Mister Right Now.' But that very night at the club Christina bumps into Peter, calls him a 'dick', and is unaccountably smitten. As in Mary, the pal tracks down the object of desire. As in Mary, they set off to said distant town. As in Mary, funny things happen en route.
The similarities end with the structure. Though The Sweetest Thing faithfully tracks every celebrated gag in Mary, it somehow manages to miss the point every time. The most obvious example is the famous 'frank'n'beans' scene in Mary, when the hero gets his frank'n'beans stuck in his zipper while using the bathroom at his prom date's parents' house. There's both an appealing innocence to the scene and a sound comic logic: he's standing there urinating, staring dreamily through the window at a bird on a branch when he suddenly spots Mary in her bra and panties at the upstairs window and in a panic yanks his fly up. Soon the bathroom is filled with emergency services: cops, fire department, concerned neighbours ... Exactly the same happens here. Christina and Courtney arrive home to find cops, firemen, neighbours, etc., clustered around Jane, who's somehow contrived to get 'stuck' while performing oral sex on her boyfriend. I say 'contrived', because it's pretty hard, even with piercings, to see how anyone could really get hung up in this way, despite the close-ups of Jane's pained face. Even sillier is the idea that the snagged penis might somehow be shaken loose by communal singing. I doubt this was funny even on paper, but as shot by Kumble it's a fifthrate rendering of a second-rate joke.
The same poor framing and pacing ruins what comic potential there might have been in Courtney getting her breast implants felt by her girlfriends, or Jane taking an obviously semen-stained dress into her neighbourhood dry-cleaner's and bumping into her old grade-school teacher and local priest. There's a lot of seed in this movie but it all falls on stony ground. Later, Christina and Courtney wind up in a men's room because the ladies is occupied by someone who 'had lamb curry last night'. So Courtney winds up trying to squat over a urinal, while Christina gets a black eye from a penis. But not to worry. Soon they're dancing in their underwear at the side of the road to Rupert Holmes's 'Escape (The Pina Colada Song)' and mimicking lesbian sex for the amusement of a passing biker.
I suppose the challenge here is to see how many bodily-fluid jokes a Hollywood star can take and still be the perky irrepressible girl next door. The fact is that, even floundering in a sticky swamp of semen, urine, vomit and lamb curry, Cameron Diaz still seems zanily wholesome. Indeed, while at one level it's astonishing and depressing that this is what passes for a mainstream studio comedy (Columbia Pictures), the Misses Diaz and Applegate give a rather old-fashioned performance, like Betty Grable and June Haver in a 1940s Fox blondes vehicle. Instead of some turn-of-the-century backporch spooning tune, they sing about enormous hard penises in a number entitled 'You're Too Big To Fit In Here', complete with orifice-indicating movements. (I'll bet it gets a Best Song Oscar nomination.) Most of the time the girls are playing to the camera rather than to their supporting players. Miss Diaz's minimal chemistry with the wossname who plays Peter can't compete with her ongoing romance with herself, her hair, her smile, her butt. Such acting honours as there are go to Jason Bateson as Peter's brother, and dear old Georgia Engel, who used to play Ted's girlfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and turns up here as a dress-store manageress. My advice to Cameron: lay off the semen for a while.
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