Aisle View: Movie Review, The Heartbreak Kid
Every era gets the Everyman it deserves. If the silent period of cinema had Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and the 1950s and ’60s had Tom Ewell and Jack Lemmon; if the 1980s and ’90s bounced back and forth between Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and still do, well, then, for better or worse, add Ben Stiller as another modern Everyman. In this case, it’s for worse, however. Though Stiller started out as an “edgy” satirical comic, like others before him such as Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, he appears to want to be loved for himself, and taken seriously as an “actor.” If not that, then at least a sex symbol. In that regard, Stiller’s collaborations with the Farrelly Brothers suit that need. Each of the two films, starting with There’s Something about Mary offer him up as a put-upon but essentially right-thinking fellow who finds himself unjustly treated and trapped in one awkward situation after another. Meanwhile, the film assumes an audience loyalty to the character that is unearned. Now, in the remake of The Heartbreak Kid, we are offered the same thing. As the main character, Ed Cantrow, finds himself on a honeymoon with a woman who turns out to be a monster while falling in love with another hotel guest who is more his type, an impatient viewer might wonder why Ed deserves either woman or any woman at all.
As is well known, the Farrelly Brothers’ Heartbreak Kid is a remake of the ’70s comedy directed by Elaine May from a Bruce Jay Friedman short story called “A Change of Plan” and scribed by Neil Simon (albeit updated with kitty rings and deviated septums). The first film was an early example of the “humor of discomfort” later realized in modern works such as Swingers and The Office. You’re not really supposed to like the people, but rather just observe them, perhaps as cautionary tales. May’s HK offered up all sorts of tense, difficult ethnic issues and Charles Grodin’s drive to dump his vulgar wife for a shiksa is almost inexplicable. Essentially, he married to get sex, to get his girlfriend finally to put out. But during a honeymoon in Florida, the arriviste in him comes out horribly.
In the Farrelly Brothers version, Cantrow is a neutral, aethnic fellow who runs a sporting goods store in San Francisco, a singleton who has the coupling of others thrown in his face all day. When he finally finds a girl, Lila (Malin Akerman, the Silk Spectre in the forthcoming Watchman movie), and marries her abruptly, her incompatible qualities are only revealed during their honeymoon in Cabo. There he meets Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), the perfect girl. In a reversal of the earlier film, it is Miranda’s family, Southerners from Oxford, Mississippi, where they are all sports coaches of one variety or another, that is extremely ethnic in its own way. Elaine May’s Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd, the era’s paradigmatic unobtainable girl next door) was a standard-issue sorority sister type, well bred and educated. Here, Miranda is a sporty brunette, a game girl, and elfin woman with a sense of fun, completely unlike the icy Kelly. The resemblances, such as they are, begin to take over only then. The remake doesn’t even begin to truly resemble the first one until 26 minutes in, when Lila wants to inscribe little post-coital circles and squares on Cantrow’s hairy chest.
Lila’s obnoxious qualities are broadly drawn. She turns out to be an illiterate unemployed former coke whore who is 26K in debt. In a legacy of her coke years she snorts apple juice out of her nose, and sings along to every song, regardless of genre (although knowing the words to all the songs ever written strikes me as a useful quality). She knows every sexual position in the lore of the Kama Sutra except the missionary position. In other words, we are set up to endorse Cantrow’s straying attentions when Lila is confined to bed with a bad sunburn and Miranda’s family welcomes him prematurely into their fold.
Both films are onto something difficult to define and rarely treated in popular entertainment, which is the sense of regret over missed opportunities one sometimes feels even in the midst of ostensibly sublime happiness. To underscore that, Lila might better have been played by another alluring, popular dish, such as Cameron Diaz, so that Cantrow’s choices and situations are hard.
But instead the Farrellys have made this project (which they came to after it had already been conceived with Jason Bateman and Amy Poehler under the direction of Barry Sonnenfeld) their own. There are more complex miscommunications involved, thanks to a pair of evil twins; there is the use of the sun and moon as dull time-transition devices; there is the appeal to pathetic nerd fantasy in showing a girl actually wanting a guy; and there is the inevitable gross moment, in this case the display of Lila’s overgrown bush with its bejeweled addendum. To its credit, the last 10 minutes feature more narrative twists, but they serve to render the film more farce-like, as opposed to the first film’s mirror to a similar scene in The Graduate, directed by May’s ex-partner in stand up comedy, Mike Nichols. But in the end, the Farrellys prefer happiness to triumph over second thoughts, cold ambition, and sad regrets.