Review: The Heartbreak Kid

You might be tempted to feel a little pity for the Farrelly Brothers; they defined the big-box-office smutty comedy with movies like There's Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin. Recently, they've sort of had their thunder (and box office) stolen by Judd Apatow's band of merrymakers and the success of Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But that mild temptation to feel pity turns into a more steely impetus to feel contempt after you witness the squalid, lumbering mess that is The Heartbreak Kid, the Farrelly's latest effort to regain their toilet-throne as the kings of the gross-out comedy. Originally released in 1972, The Heartbreak Kid saw Neil Simon adapting Bruce Jay Friedman's short story A Change of Plan, with direction by Elaine May. The idea is simple -- a man, while on his honeymoon, meets and falls for another woman. The execution in the 1972 film was elegant, astute and smart: A comedy of manners about the mores and meanings of modern marriage, springing from the minds of three clever, talented comedians who knew how to go for the jugular and still had the sense to back off and let us breathe a little.

I only mention this in order to contrast it with the 2007 update, which is inelegant, oblivious and crass: A 'comedy' of rudeness about the mindlessness and meaningless of modern moviemaking, spring from the gonads and bowels of two dim, untalented filmmakers who only know how to cross the line and lack any sense whatsoever. In this iteration of The Heartbreak Kid, our hero is a San Francisco sporting goods store owner played by Ben Stiller. He's been commitment-phobic for so long that he may in fact be commitment-proof, which is weighing heavy on his mind after the Valentine's Day wedding of a woman he was once engaged to. On his way home, though, he has a meet-cute with a surprisingly vivacious and charming woman, Malin Akerman; they fall into a whirlwind courtship, but the news that her work wants to send her to Rotterdam a few weeks into their relationship inspires Stiller to make a leap of faith and propose. The wedding follows soon after.

On the honeymoon, though -- which involves a road trip to Cabo in Mexico -- it becomes readily apparent that Akerman's more loathsome than lovely. She's a bore, a flake, a sexually voracious harpy who has horrible taste in pillow talk , possessed of a ruined past and dim future. She is, in other words, a completely invented, fake screenwriter's creation whose phoniness saps any and all comedic or dramatic tension out of the movie: Of course we want Stiller to ditch her. The Heartbreak Kid was, based on the credits, first re-written by Scot Armstrong (School for Scoundrels, Road Trip) then that draft was re-written by Leslie Dixon (Hairspray, Freaky Friday). Armstrong and Dixon haven't exactly set the world on fire with those efforts, but all of them contain no small amount of craft and heart and good will; I'd be very interested in seeing their versions of this film. Watching the finished Heartbreak Kid, though, it's impossible to glimpse what those drafts were like as every scene bears the greasy, muck-encrusted fingerprints of Peter and Bobby Farrelly (credited alongside newcomer Kevin Barnett). The entire film is marked and marred and unmade by the trademark Farrelly 'comedy sensibility,' which their dwindling number of fans consider 'uproarious' and 'politically incorrect' and anyone with an I.Q. above their belt size sees as dim and low and crass.

Are we supposed to laugh when Akerman's character screams out in the middle of coitus that she wants Stiller to service her '... like a black guy!"? Or at the sight of Stiller trying to make it back into America from Mexico alongside a coterie of illegal immigrants? Or at the sight of Carlos Mencia playing a rank, cheap stereotype, right down to his Frito Bandito mustache? And if the film's smug, throwaway racism is bad (and it is) the casual misogyny might be worse. Do we need to see Akerman's nether regions -- pubic pelt puffed out, piercing gleaming -- sixty feet tall as the only object visible on the big screen? Do we need a joke, midway through the closing credits, about Akerman being serviced by a donkey? It's not merely that these things are hateful -- the kind of 'just kidding' comedy you only think to attempt if you're a privileged, rich, white male film maker -- but worse, they're not funny. And Stiller -- whose comedic timing and charm helped salvage a small part of There's Something About Mary from the Farrelly's excesses -- just looks tired and worn-down here.

Eventually, Stiller meets Michelle Monaghan, and the film tries to have it both ways as Stiller falls for her. In the original, Cybill Shepherd was mostly an enigma, a possibility, a dream; in modern mealy-mouthed hypocritical Hollywood, Monaghan has to be both a lovable girl-next-door and a slammin' hottie. There is one scene where she and Stiller interact in a way that seems even remotely human as they share a jay by the dock -- and then the clammy-handed dimwit grip of the script takes over and they have to go back to acting like idiot puppets again, with their strings pulled by the Farrelly's coincidences and misunderstandings and frantic flailing.

And adding insult to injury is the simple fact that the Farrellys cannot, for the life of them, actually shoot a film. Every movie they've produced has the same shooting style -- lazy scenes, lazy composition and a smeary, sickly look to the cinematography that makes you wonder if the camera itself has the flu. What does it say about a movie when it is, in fact, shot with even less visual wit and craft than the execrable Good Luck Chuck? When you find yourself thinking Not only is this movie horrible, it's also 20 minutes too long? When you ask not simply 'Who wrote this thing?", but, more importantly, "Who read it?" Did any one at any level of involvement -- putting up the money, playing the parts, planning the promotion -- actually read the Farrelly's final draft of the script? And if they did, what could possibly have compelled them to back it? Did visions of the duo's lifetime box office ($579 million domestic, after all) cloud any and all capacity for good taste or good judgment or wise decision making? The Heartbreak Kid is a shabby, sleazy train wreck; it's possibly the worst movie of 2007, and anyone who backed it with money or their name before its being made or rewards it with money or acclaim upon its release should feel, if they can feel at all, something like shame.