In His Memoir, Matthew Perry Describes the Grossout Comedy Serving Sara as a Personal and Professional Nadir. He Wasn't Wrong!
In his much-talked-about memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry devotes far more space to his poorly received 2002 vehicle Serving Sara than he does to his time as the star of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, one of the biggest, most notorious flops in television history.
That’s because Perry’s blockbuster book is fundamentally about the actor’s ferocious, decades-long battle with drugs and alcohol. It was a fight that he would ultimately lose when he died of a ketamine overdose about a year after the book’s release.
Perry’s death wouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who’d read his book. The Friends superstar’s adult life was an endless series of near-misses. You can only cheat death for so long; it comes for everyone, particularly alcoholics and drug addicts.
Serving Sara has a prominence in the book wildly disproportionate to its meager box-office tally and faint cultural footprint. So, of course, I had to see it: morbid fascination and all.
The Reginald Hudlin-directed slapstick comedy marked a personal and professional nadir for Perry. He was so deep into his addiction that filming had to stop for months so that Perry could go to rehab.
He was shooting Friends and Saving Sara at the same time. That schedule would test the strongest soul, but Perry was barely hanging on.
That’s analogous to filming for Paris When It Sizzles, shutting down so that William Holden could receive treatment for his alcoholism. That led to the invention of a new character played by Tony Curtis, who gave the cast and crew new scenes to shoot while the star was drying out.
These supremely fluffy light comedies have a tragic undercurrent. They each shut down so their male romantic lead could deal with addiction issues that would eventually lead to premature deaths.
Serving Sara similarly had to improvise because the man carrying the film on his shoulders was incapable of professionalism and self-control.
A pre-stardom Terry Crews, still a few years away from his star-making turns in Idiocracy and White Chicks, plays Vernon, a bodyguard for Gordon Moore, a Texas-fried millionaire goober played by Bruce Campbell.
Hudlin’s two directions for Campbell appear to have been “bigger” and “dumber.” It is tragic when Bruce Campbell overacting wildly doesn’t engender a single weak smile of semi-amusement.
It sure feels like Crews had a scene or two, but when Hudlin saw how amazing he looks in tight white cowboy garb, he told the future Brooklyn 99 star, “Great news! Matty is too smashed to film, so it’s your time to shine! I’m putting you in five new scenes. You don’t need dialogue; just say whatever the hell pops into your mind. It’s got to be better than the screenplay.”
With admirable candor, Perry concedes that he was so drunk and sloppy when making this that he had to come in after filming had commenced and post-dub every line of dialogue. EVERYTHING. Perry slurred to the point of incomprehensibility on the set.
If I might lavish Perry with the faintest of praise, the post-dubbing is not too noticeable. That, alas, is the nicest thing that can be said about his performance here.
As Perry would be the first to admit, he was in bad shape physically and emotionally when he made Serving Sara. He wasn’t just thin; he was sickly and gaunt. Perry has the ghostly pallor of someone who indulges all of their vices yet steers clear of anything resembling self-care.
They hoped for the best when they hired Perry, the star of perhaps the most popular television show. The script was abysmal, but they cast Perry thinking he would elevate the material with improvisation and physical comedy. Instead, his demons and cross-addictions made an already dodgy project even worse.
Unfortunately for the cast and crew of Serving Sara, this was a Matthew Perry movie that showcased the actor at his absolute worst as an actor and a human being. If Perry were not one of the biggest TV stars at the time, I suspect this would have gone direct-to-video. It’s that bad.
In Serving Sara, Perry plays process server Joe Taylor. That’s a professional that is rarely seen onsceen on account of it being so goddamn boring. There’s nothing particularly cinematic about handing someone legal documents.
Serving Sara tries to give process serving the momentum and excitement of a runaway train by having Joe accomplish his professional ends by behaving like a wisecracking con man with an endless array of accents, dialects, and characters, each more feeble than the last.
Joe isn’t averse to bending the rules or breaking them. In a sequence that enraged me to the point of madness, at one point, Joe uses a flaming tire to distract the doorman at a fancy building so he can sneak inside unnoticed.
If Serving Sara worked on any level, this might qualify as nifty dark comedy. However, Serving Sara is a complete bust, so I found myself asking a lot of unanswerable questions. Where did he get that flaming tire? How did he send it careening into a fancy building without getting burnt himself? What if the flaming tire spreads and ends up taking the lives of dozens?
Serving Sara never answers these questions. This leads me to believe that there is a scene or scenes setting up the flaming tire gag that was somehow deemed not good enough to be in Serving Sara. That’s just sad.
This spectacularly stupid movie’s dumb plot finds its wisecracking hero looking to serve divorce papers to British socialite Sarah Moore (Elizabeth Hurley), Gordon Moore's (Bruce Campbell) soon-to-be ex-wife.
The divorcee makes the ethically challenged process server an offer he can’t refuse; if he changes sides and serves Gordon with papers, she’ll give him a million dollars of her divorce settlement.
Serving Sara is a romantic comedy that’s not romantic or much of a comedy. It’s hard to have rip-roaring chemistry with an actress who is probably filled with rage because your substance abuse problems have destroyed the film’s microscopic chance of being any damn good at all.
The mismatched pair then set out on the road to find and serve Gordon before he can serve Sara. Slapstick scenarios ensue, none more agonizing than a scene in Amarillo, Texas, where, for reasons far too stupid to expound upon, Joe pretends to be a veterinarian.
These cowpokes need assistance with a bull. Unfortunately for Joe, Perry, and the audience, they need help working the prostrate of a mighty and mighty horny bull.
The process server finds himself with his entire arm lodged in the bull’s anus while he ejaculates big buckets of baby batter.
It’s a slapstick set piece that announces itself well in advance. The look of shame mixed with mortification on Perry’s face seems to belong to the actor as much as the character he’s playing.
It would be a regrettable bit of grossout physical comedy even if the Farrelly Brothers-produced Say It Ain’t So didn’t feature a similar scene a year earlier. I guess there was just something in the air in the early aughts that made filmmakers want to explore the infinite comic gold of a dude sticking his arm up a bull’s posterior to help him achieve the magic of orgasm.
Look closely, and you can see Perry regretting every life choice that led to that moment. Perry was paid three and a half million dollars. He was sued when shooting had to shut down for months so that he could go to rehab and ended up settling for 650,000 dollars, or what he made for three days’ work on Friends.
Both of these actors are way better than the material.
Serving Sara does everything wrong. Like Madame Web, it attempts to objectify a famously sexy actress by putting her in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit in a way that’s not just non-sexy but anti-sexy.
Madame Web accomplished the impossible feat of putting Sydney Sweeney, a sexy actress, in iconically sexy garb without being sexy in the least.
huh huh, huh huh
Joe convinces Sarah Moore to flash her naked breasts to a motel clerk played by Mike Judge to let them stay in the establishment, but she doesn’t make a strong an impression as Amy Adams as Gordon’s mistress.
Before she became an A-list actress with six Oscar nominations, Adams was the eye candy in this rancid slapstick abomination. As Gordon’s much younger mistress, Adams’ cleavage is hypnotic. Along with the flaming tire and scene where Perry helps a randy bull achieve an overpowering orgasm, Adams’ radiant beauty is all I will remember about this, other than, you know, the aching sadness that continually threatens to rise to the surface.
At the risk of being controversial, Amy Adams is a beautiful woman.
Serving Sara’s tone is one of flailing desperation. It’s loud and dumb and wholly devoid of inspiration. Perry probably didn’t remember much about its making. In that respect, he was fortunate. I’m already well on my way to forgetting it.
Serving Sara is the lightest of light comedies, but it will be half-remembered primarily for the unwittingly central role it played in the heavy tragedy of Perry’s pain-filled life and early, seemingly inevitable death.
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