The Whole Nine Yards
Painless Fun
Ask the average person to name a movie about dentists, and he’ll almost certainly cite Marathon Man, in which a completely over-the-top Laurence Olivier plays a fiendish Nazi who uses macabre dental techniques to extract information from bug-eyed Dustin Hoffman.
– Joe Queenan, Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler
There are no coincidences, of course. Everything happens for a reason. (Or at least that’s what I’ll tell Paul Thomas Anderson if he ever asks me why the Academy didn’t give Magnolia more nominations than just Tom Cruise.) So, when I bought the Queenan book the week before last, it was meant that I would find his seminal piece on the history of the portrayal of the dental profession in film, and use it to make a point about The Whole Nine Yards, a movie about a Montreal dentist (Matthew Perry) who discovers that his neighbor is a recently-paroled Chicago mobster (Bruce Willis).
Queenan reviewed the entire canon of dentists on film, from Erich von Stroeheim’s 1925 movie Greed (about a dentist whose life is destroyed by a miserly wife) to Steve Martin’s sadistic Orvin Scrivello from the Rick Moranis version of Little Shop of Horrors (my favorite movie musical, which to this day has me singing, occasionally: You’ll be a dennntist… you’ll have a habit for causing great pain!). Queenan’s thesis is that Hollywood can only see dentists as the “object of derision, ridicule, and contempt, not to mention revulsion and fear.” Movie dentists, according to Queenan, are generally dangerous sadists like Olivier and Martin, or incompetent bunglers with low self-esteem like Bob Hope in The Paleface or Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West.
Perry plays the latter sort of dentist. Oh, he’s competent enough with a drill (minus one funny scene where his shaky, nervous hand terrifies a patient) but he’s bungled the rest of his life and he knows it. An early scene shows him chased out of his house by his sneering, condescending wife and mother-in-law; Perry attempts to drive to work but can’t get out of the driveway because his impotent rage keeps him pounding the steering wheel with his hands and head.
We find out more: Perry is an American forced to relocate to Canada because of bad gambling debts incurred by his late father-in-law, a suicide victim. (Perry is forced to explain this to Willis, while insisting that he himself is not a suicide threat. “Statistics don’t lie,” says Willis.) Perry is trapped: he can’t escape his wife or his debts or his job or Canada itself. When mobster Willis moves next door, however, a tantalizing escape route opens. Perry’s wife offers him a divorce if he will rat out Willis to the Chicago mob for a finder’s fee. Most of the rest of the plot involves Perry running into — sometimes literally — various mob types, from Michael Clarke Duncan’s giant soft-spoken contract killer to Kevin Pollak’s twitchy Romanian crime lord to Willis’s knockout wife, played by the sweet-faced Natasha Henstridge.
With this kind of plot, and with Willis constantly mugging for the cameras, The Whole Nine Yards could easily have been a disaster of Hudson Hawk-like proportions. That it is not is largely due to Perry’s good work. Perry’s character here is not fundamentally different from his character in Friends, however, this part depends much more on slapstick and reaction shots than it does on clever one-liners or sarcastic comments. (e.g. “Could this movie review BE any longer?”) Perry fully grasps the low-self esteem of the cinematic dentist and sticks to self-deprecating comedy.
Perry is ably assisted in the comedy department by Sweet Amanda Peet, who plays his ditzy assistant. Peete’s character has the silliest moment in the movie when she turns out to be a wannabe contract killer herself. “I’m still a virgin,” she explains to Willis. “I haven’t killed anybody yet.” Peet (think young Geena Davis) is just super in this movie, with a disarming wit and a (again, literally) distracting figure.
The problem with The Whole Nine Yards (other than the interminable length of time the movie takes to wrap up the plot points) is that the comedy itself is so forgettable. The movie is a likable piece of fluff, no more, no less. If you remember this three months from now, it will only be to wonder if that was Michael Duncan Clarke or Ving Rhames who played the black dude. The only thing that threatens to be memorable is that The Whole Nine Yards, for once, doesn’t disguise that it was shot up in Canada on the cheap. (Canadian cities are frequently disguised as American cities in low-budget productions with varying degrees of success — the snow-capped Rockies in the background of Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx spring to mind.) It’s nice to see our neighbors to the north get a little credit where credit is due, and The Whole Nine Yards reciprocates by limiting the Canada jokes to some tame sniping about Canadians putting mayonnaise on burgers.
However, this leaves one big question unanswered: why isn’t the movie called The Whole 8.2 Meters?
Just asking.