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The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)
🕑 Added 2022-01-18 23:24:13 +0000 UTC
Ironically, this was probably a great choice as my introduction to Elaine May. If the films she both wrote and directed exhibit more of this sensibility, they must be really, really good. Almost everything that doesn't work here is attributable to the script, and I have seen enough Neil Simon to recognize his brand of sentimental wackiness. In so many respects, May seems to be actively working against the tendencies of the script, to produce something genuinely discomfiting, even a bit dangerous.
I have seen Charles Grodin in a lot of roles, and he usually has the same approach. Beleaguered, frustrated, but essentially sensible, Grodin made a career out of the slow burn. But as Leonard, he is completely psychotic. His temper is on a hair trigger; he doubles down on his preposterous lies; he has no consciousness of basic social decorum or even decency. This is as close to a George Costanza movie as I can imagine, and May wisely frames Leonard's remorseless selfishness against the reactions of ordinary people who are aghast at his behavior. The best example of this, of course, is the breakup scene, where he circuitously tells his new wife Lila (Jeannie Berlin) that he's leaving her while ranting about the poor service at the seafood restaurant. Elderly extras in the background glare at him as if he's just mooned the entire dining room.
The primary themes of Heartbreak Kid are pure Simon, but May uses stilted interactions and an almost forensic realism to display their pathology. This is a story about a hapless Jew who gets swept up in "Shiksa-peal," in the form of the vapid, blithely sadistic Kelly (Cybil Shepherd). His attraction to her is irrational because it stems from self-hatred. (May's bookending of the film with the two weddings, the first overly Jewish, the second steeped in Midwestern WASPery, is brilliant.) Kelly is a game player, and Leonard is too self-absorbed to recognize that she's toying with him out of boredom. But Shepherd's performance, with its eerie lack of emotion even during sex, perfectly displays the racial crisis at the heart of The Heartbreak Kid. As a rich, blonde Christian "of good stock," she can get away with anything, in a way Leonard never will. (Kelly resembles a future Fox News anchor.)
Much as Lila infuses pathos into the film by having recognizably human reactions, Kelly's father Dwayne (Eddie Albert) provides an outlet for audience tension by recognizing what Leonard does not. He sees that his future son-in-law is a worthless, amoral scammer, and although his hatred of Leonard is clearly underpinned by some Oedipal issues (note the pictures of Kelly scattered throughout the house, the most prominent being on Daddy's desk), he also embodies the kind of smug Christian ethics that Leonard professes to admire. We can see that Dwayne is a proto-Trumpist creep, but he's not wrong about the lunatic trying to seduce his daughter.
I know that May has been rediscovered in the decades since her exile from the film industry, having been blamed for the failure of Ishtar so that its prominent male leads could escape scot-free. In The Heartbreak Kid, I clearly see some of the early roots of the comedy of embarrassment that will triumph in the 1990s. At times, The Heartbreak Kid is truly painful to watch. When you consider how different this performance is from Grodin's usual work, I can assume May had a lot to do with telling him how to amp up the disturbing, cringy elements of Leonard. In his own way, Grodin is as unhinged and uncivilized as Jerry Lewis, replacing childlike id with naked aggression.
But there's also a feminist undercurrent in this film that I doubt was really present in the Simon script or the original Bruce Jay Friedman story. No matter how big of a loser Leonard is, no matter how sociopathic and self-justifying he becomes, he still manages to survive, to win the girl in the end. (For how long, one can only guess.) Meanwhile, Lila is excised from the story and sent back home to mother. There is nothing funny about the way she is shattered and discarded, and May shows us that the chatty, sexless stereotype of the Jewish woman -- the Lila in Leonard's head that he rejects -- is a projection of Jewish men's misogyny and racial neurosis. One look at The Heartbreak Kid, and we wonder why we ever found Woody Allen cute in the first place.
