…und dann kam Polly (2004)

…und dann kam Polly: Directed by John Hamburg. With Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Debra Messing. A buttoned-up newlywed finds his strictly organized life descend into chaos when he falls in love with an old classmate.

“The story in this movie revolves around the choice between safety and richness. Because it assumes we are stupid, it has two story lines to hammer the point home, the point that safety is the wrong choice.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd then in the highest of ironies, the picture is fabricated and presented in a way that picks the safe choice in every single element. Every one.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBut there is something worth watching here. If you take out the toilet jokes, and the two horrible main characters, and the sappy moral, and the dumb animal joke, you end up with a few great supporting characters: Hank Azaria, Alec Baldwin, and Missi Pyle could have made a better movie with just their characters.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBut the thing that makes this worth watching is Phil Hoffman. He is terrific in most things, but I like him best when he is like this, a weak director and no important function in the story. That means he can be inventive in unconstrained ways. It means we see his energetic projection.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe character he plays is one of those folded ones: an actor playing an actor whose role in the story is in a play, and in a reality TeeVee show of himself, and finally as u0026quot;proxyu0026quot; for Ben Stiller while Stiller is off doing the formula date movie ending.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWatch this just for Hoffman. See him perform the role as written: a hasbeen actor who has invented himself as a character. And then see him make that circular by convincing us that the actor is him in real life.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eTedu0026#39;s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.”