** (out of ****)
Starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent D’Onofrio, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Bateman, and John Michael Higgins
Directed by Peyton Reed & written by Jeremy Garelick, Jay Lavender, and Vince Vaughn
2006
105 min PG13
IMDb summary: “In a bid to keep their luxurious condo from their significant other, a couple’s break-up proceeds to get uglier and nastier by the moment.”
There are about 30 or 40 really good minutes in “The Break-Up,” in which the couple fights the way real couples do. And the ending is more-or-less how the movie should end, and quite satisfying. I wish the movie could have been content to be one of those short miracles you stumble across on PBS at 11:30 at night. Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, as the feuding live-in couple, both have easygoing deliveries and sharply-drawn personalities – when they fight it makes sense.
But then “The Break-Up” has to pad itself out to feature length, with too many “wacky” best friends and too many “wacky ways that they get back at each other!” Hookers, karate, cheap tricks, whatever. These interludes could have been put in any order and used by any romantic comedy couple. We could have gone without all the wacky friends, including the always adorable Joey Lauren Adams, and John Michael Higgins, who married the ex-porn star in “A Mighty Wind.” As I imagine “The Break-Up” as that 35-minute short you find on PBS, I imagine the two lovers talking directly to the camera while a disembodied voice gives them advice. That would be cool.
The only friend who really works is Vincent D’Onofrio, who seems genetically incapable of giving an uninteresting performance. He was the giant alien cockroach in “Men in Black,” Orson Welles in “Ed Wood,” and, of course, Private Pyle in “Full Metal Jacket.” Here he is the embodiment of the pent-up, shy Midwesterner with a lot on his mind and a jacket that’s a little too full. It’s to “The Break-Up’s” credit that his character is funny but not a joke. Oh, and Jason Bateman, as the soft-spoken realtor-friend, also has a nice scene in which he explains, very hard, how he wishes he didn’t have to take a commission.
“The Break-Up” follows the common practice of late in which the girl is cultured, intelligent, and willing to work on the relationship, while the boy is a dopey swine (the Ashton Kutcher / Brittany Murphy thing comes to mind). While this is not an uncommon arrangement in real life, it would be intriguing to see how the dynamics might differ if the boy were the cultured one and the girl were threatened by the struggle to always keep up.
And, of course, the dude is Polish (Grobowski specifically, calling to mind grubs). I am an undying advocate of “-skis,” “-cyzks,” “-wiczs,” and “ethnic” movie names in general, but when was the last time a movie had a Pole who wasn’t a working class slob? No, little has changed since Stanley yelled for Stella, so Poles usually answer to things like “Wojtyla, wash your hands before someone sees you!” If we were to believe the movies, Poles can’t produce female offspring either – you have to marry into it. The last movie to feature a rich “-ski” and a girl “-ski” was probably “The Big Lebowski.” But I digress. It was also nice to see The Old 97s in a movie, playing their one hit from however many years ago that they had their one hit.
Finished Friday, December 15th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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