Not having been to a movie in a month (yes, I have so far missed Paycheck and Peter Pan), I decided to go see this Ben Stiller comedy. I don’t know whether this was a mistake or not. I guess it would have been a mistake had the Century 16 been showing anything new that looked any better. In any case, if I had to define this movie with a single word, “contrived” would come immediately to mind.

Ruben Feffer (Stiller) has just been jilted (in favor of a massive French scuba diving instructor) by his wife of one day (Debra Messing). Remarkable that this apparently didn’t happen at any time during the four years that they were dating … Returning to his job as a risk assessor for a New York underwriting firm, Feffer lets himself be dragged off to a party by his oldest friend the moderately obnoxious actor Sandy Lyle (Philip Seymour Hoffman); there he meets an old middle-school acquaintance, Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston), towards whom he immediately rebounds. Polly, who lives in a cheap walk-up flat somewhere downtown, has no plans for life, and goes where the spirit takes her; Feffer, whose business is to know statistics about risks, will not eat peanuts out of a bowl in a bar, and will not step on subway gratings. How these two will ever find true happiness is a question.

A plethora of subplots may contribute to the comedy, but hardly at all to the story. We spend ten minutes following the first day of Feffer’s marriage; this could have been omitted (in fact, he could have been an unreconstructed bachelor) without in any way damaging his relationship with Polly — but then the movie would only have been eighty minutes long. There are episodes involved with Feffer’s assignment to determine the insurability of Leland Van Lew (Bryan Brown), an Australian who swims with sharks, parachutes off high buildings, and drives his yacht at high speed onto reefs; presumably this is intended to emphasize a gradual migration of Feffer’s soul from the quantitative to the qualitative world of risk assessment (which will also contribute to his eventual relationship with Polly), but here I theorize. Getting rid of Feffer’s interactions with Van Lew would also have contributed to a reduction of the film’s length. And Lyle’s obsession with his “professional” status as an actor (he once played a role in a movie) seems to be unnecessary to the story. By this time we are down to an hour of story, about right for TV.

John Hamburg, who wrote and directed this film, seems to have an obsession with bowel problems. Feffer (who suffers from something called “irritable bowel syndrome”) spends one scene enthroned in a rest room in which — he discovers to his horror — there is no toilet paper. Funny enough, I suppose, but the additional sound effects, emphasized, were not, I think, particularly necessary (the ferret who invaded the rest room halfway through didn’t seem to appreciate them, either). Similarly unnecessary was the emphasis (at the party at which Ruben meets Polly) on Lyle’s sudden suffering of a “shart”, a word whose meaning he describes in detail.

I kind of like Stiller, who is willing to suffer comedic embarassment in his films and seems less serious about his work than some of the contemporaries I associate with him (Damon, Affleck, Norton). But I’m pretty sure that this film is not his best work.