Elaine May (1972)
The Heartbreak Kid was released just as I was getting interested in cinema but I didn’t see it at the time, had never seen it since, and don’t remember passing up opportunities in television listings to rectify the omission. The screening of the film on Channel 4 on New Year’s Day was part of a Father Ted evening and thanks to Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, who love the film and acknowledge it as a big influence on their writing. After listening to the pair talk so engagingly and interestingly about the ancestry and comic dynamics of Father Ted, it was difficult to watch The Heartbreak Kid without thinking of them. It became even more difficult when I realised that Charles Grodin, as the picture’s foolish protagonist, had a look of Ardal O’Hanlon (as well as of a young George W Bush) about him. The connection between two things in particular that Mathews and Linehan said kept occurring to me as the film progressed. First, that the highest praise they could give to comedy was that it was extremely silly (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer was given as an example). Second, that they wanted to create in Father Ted a female sitcom character who was more than an audience for, or on the receiving end of, what the male characters got up to. By respecting both these principles, they came up with Mrs Doyle. Although she’s the priests’ skivvy, she’s also strongly individual. Her behaviour is at least as silly (often as proactively silly) as theirs.
In The Heartbreak Kid, however, Lenny Cantrow (Grodin) has a near-monopoly on silliness and the other significant characters (all but one of them female) are put in the position of having to respond to him. Linehan and Mathews described the film as a ‘very special’ one – but didn’t enlarge much on why. Lenny (the malignant Bishop Brennan in Father Ted is also a Len) does plenty of dim and/or inexcusable things yet, as so often, we’re meant to root for a man behaving badly in comedy because he can’t help it and because he’s more simpatico (he can’t help that either) than anyone else on view. What made The Heartbreak Kid much more of a rarity – and perhaps this helps Linehan and Mathews to feel comfortable admiring it – was that it was directed by a woman, one who was already an illustrious name as part of a comedy double act with a man. It’s a rarity too in that the screenplay is by Neil Simon but adapted from the work of another writer (a short novel, A Change of Plan, by Bruce Jay Friedman). The film also surprises in the directions the story eventually takes.
Thirtyish, Jewish Lenny Cantrow lives in New York (Charles Grodin was actually thirty-seven at the time). He’s spent three years in the army; he’s now a sports equipment sales rep. In a fast-moving opening to the film, he courts Lila (Jeannie Berlin), marries her, and they go on honeymoon to Florida. These early sequences are just about perfect. The Jewish wedding ceremony, joyous and inelegant, is well observed – especially in the shot of the tall, well-built bride, looking a bit like a wedding cake, being inched down a narrow aisle with a parent either side of her. Lenny is on a continuous surge of enthusiasm for Lila – or for sex with Lila (who won’t have it until they’re husband and wife) – until the marriage actually gets underway. Although they enjoy their wedding night in a motel en route to Florida, Lila’s irritating habits start hitting Lenny’s nerves. She asks him repeatedly to confirm he’s happy with her; she talks as she chomps on a roll and bits of egg accumulate on her face. Lenny’s happy grin starts to fracture: Lila keeps reminding him too that their marriage is going to last ‘forty … fifty … sixty years’. Once they’re in Florida, Lenny is impatient to get started on the sunbathing, goes down to the beach ahead of Lila and there meets Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a beautiful, Wasp blonde from Minnesota.
Lila’s first, rash attempt to get a tan ends in horrible sunburn and she’s confined to the couple’s hotel room. While she’s out of action, Lenny sees Kelly as much as possible – to the mounting irritation of her adoring but bigoted businessman father (Eddie Albert). I knew this was the basic plot of The Heartbreak Kid and assumed the fling with Kelly (not really even a fling) and the movie would end when the honeymoon did, with Lenny resuming his life sentence with Lila and being able to remember and regret forever his bad luck in meeting Kelly at just the wrong moment. This would have made the story a good comic twist – tempered with eventual realism – on the idea of honeymoon as romantic zenith (essentially not that different from what happens to the Rebecca Hall character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona in a pre-nuptial variation on the theme). In fact, the marriage ends before the honeymoon does: on their return to New York, Lenny arranges a quickie divorce from Lila then sets out to let Kelly and her parents know he’s got things sorted and is now a free man.
From this point onwards, I lost belief in The Heartbreak Kid. At first, it’s merely hard to keep from your mind the memory of Lila’s family at the recent wedding – and the thought of how they would be reacting to their daughter’s aborted marriage (and how their son-in-law would stand up to their reaction). But then Lenny travels to Minnesota and confronts Kelly, who’s with other students at the college she’s started attending: you can’t accept that this comfortably self-centred girl would hear him out, let alone take the relationship further. Kelly’s primary emotional relationship appears to be with her father – she knows he too is eating out of her hand and the only terms on which you can believe she might go all the way with Lenny is as a means of stirring up Mr Corcoran. (She’s amiably neutral with her placid mother, played by Audra Lindley, who was also Cybill Shepherd’s mother in the TV sitcom Cybill.) If we’re meant to think that Lenny’s daring doggedness changes Kelly’s mind about him there’s something wrong with Cybill Shepherd’s playing of her. Kelly is unchanged – she remains a smug, amused tease.
The cumulative effect of the events on the honeymoon is both farcical and, in the scene when Lenny tells Lila he can’t live with her, distressing. The rapid accumulation of those events may be improbable but they’re amusing and effective because there’s a truth to them, given the characters involved. (Although it’s never easy to believe that Lenny is dim enough to think that a rich, pampered Daddy’s girl like Kelly has real feelings for him.) Charles Grodin’s performance as Lenny is both funny and intelligent: his and (I assume) Elaine May’s decision to put some of the actor’s intelligence into the character makes a big difference. Lenny’s words and behaviour in the Florida part of The Heartbreak Kid suggest a thoughtless fool but the glints of reflectiveness that come through from Grodin give a niggling tension to the character. Once we see Lenny in Minnesota, Grodin’s approach makes sense – there is more to Lenny than you might have thought from what he did on honeymoon.
Grodin also keeps you largely sympathetic towards him (Lenny might well have been insufferable) but his skill isn’t enough for us to suspend disbelief in what happens in the movie’s second half. As Lenny’s behaviour becomes less farcical it becomes more incredible. It made no sense to me on any level that Lenny gets to marry Kelly. It seems he’s allowed to only so that – once he’s landed the prize – he can resume wishing for something different (doubts set in even earlier this time, at the wedding reception). The film ends here – and its sobering last scene seems to carry an implication that Lenny is chronically dissatisfied and that this says something about the American drive to achieve and acquire. This note rings false: it isn’t as if Lenny has dashed into the second marriage as thoughtlessly as the first. It isn’t clear either why he should be so immediately disenchanted with his new bride.
Eddie Albert is excellent as Mr Corcoran: his slow burns as he listens to his daughter’s suitor are masterly. But it’s Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as Lila whose portrait is the most satisfying in The Heartbreak Kid. This is partly because Lila’s screen time is confined to the pre-nuptial and honeymoon stages of the story: Berlin doesn’t – unlike Grodin, Albert and Shepherd – have to cope with the contradictions in the latter part of the picture. Berlin does a wonderful job of making Lila both pitiable and alarming. When she and Lenny are in bed together, she’s ridiculous and oppressive but sensual too: she makes you feel how Lenny must be feeling. Lila’s final scene – in which she gets to eat lobster before Lenny delivers the coup de grâce – is perhaps the film’s finest. The writing, the direction and Grodin and Berlin’s acting are all at their best here. (Lenny’s excessively angry outburst with the waiter, because the restaurant has run short of the pecan pie that Lenny’s kept promising Lila, is especially convincing as a guilty anticipation of the hard words of a different kind he’s about to launch on his newlywed wife. Charles Grodin delivers this tirade brilliantly.) This scene is the outstanding example of the distinctive comic tone that Pauline Kael praises in her review of the film: you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is funny or not.
2 January 2011
