Heartbreak Hotel
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Heartbreak Hotel Where you don't want to stay. by John Podhoretz In 1972 Neil Simon teamed up with director Elaine May, the greatest female comic sketch artist of her time, on a movie with a heart...
...Aristotle said comedy John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...she's sporty and fun and seems like a lovely person in every way...
...The Heartbreak Kid (1972) is a movie so difficult to watch at times that you never want to see it twice...
...Eventually he takes Lila to the hotel restaurant and dumps his sniveling, weeping bride by telling her he knows the best way for her to be happy is to experience pain that will make her grow...
...The sex is lousy...
...Lenny is one of the most distasteful protagonists in motion-picture history...
...It probably seemed like an inspired idea to star Ben Stiller in a remake of The Heartbreak Kid...
...It's much easier to take than the original...
...offers a vision of the "painlessly ugly," but then Aristotle died 2500 years before The Heartbreak Kid, the most painful American comedy ever made...
...The less glamorous and more down-to-earth woman is the one for him...
...She's not an awkward virgin but a demonic bed partner with a sadomasochistic streak...
...Cybill Shepherd's character is beautiful but unpleasant...
...When Lila gets her sunburn (in Cabo San Lucas, not Miami), Eddie meets and falls for a brunette named Miranda...
...Stiller's Eddie is just another of his patented schlubs, almost exactly the same person he played in There's Something About Mary, 10 years older...
...He spends a couple of days flirting back, never telling her he's married and spinning wild lies about his absences to his wife...
...she spews food and juice through her nostrils because she destroyed her nose with coke...
...Far from being the comedy of bad manners that is May's version, Stiller's Heartbreak Kid is a wild and raunchy farce in the manner of There's Something About Mary...
...The Heartbreak Kid (2007) is so routine an R-rated farce that you've seen it before, and don't need to see it again...
...She doesn't slobber the way the original Lila does...
...This is not surprising, since it was cowritten and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, who also made that landmark comedy with Stiller...
...Charles Grodin's performance as Lenny is unmatchable because, like the movie itself, he doesn't flinch from inhabiting the worst aspects of his character...
...When they arrive in Miami Beach, Lila gets a gruesome sunburn that confines her to their hotel room...
...We only feel for Lila because she is pathetic...
...by John Podhoretz In 1972 Neil Simon teamed up with director Elaine May, the greatest female comic sketch artist of her time, on a movie with a heart of ice called The Heartbreak Kid...
...Most telling, though, is that everybody knows someone like Lenny...
...Stiller has become one of the most financially successful performers in box-office history by specializing in the comedy of humiliation...
...The emotional ruth-lessness of the original film has been replaced by anything-goes ribaldry that includes a glimpse of a sex scene between a girl and a donkey...
...Her father is an anti-Semitic jerk...
...Lenny, a sporting-goods salesman who wants to be a playboy swinger, marries Lila, a Long Island girl who will not sleep with him without a wedding ring...
...She's not crass and obnoxious the way Cybill Shepherd's WASP dream was...
...In mammoth hits like There's Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, and its sequel, he is maimed and tortured and exposed as a liar and humiliated and insulted and defamed and teased...
...Nobody here is even remotely attractive...
...Lila is annoying with her clumsy affection and repellent when it comes to her eating habits...
...Lenny goes down to the beach alone and encounters a flirtatious co-ed played by Cybill Shepherd...
...Our protagonist, Eddie, isn't a young New Yorker on the make but an unlucky-in-love 40-year-old who intervenes when a blonde bombshell named Lila is apparently mugged on a San Francisco street...
...Then he moves to Minnesota to win over Cybill Shepherd, whose WASPy family cannot withstand a Jewish steamroller who will say and do anything to get what he wants...
...And she's so dumb that she can't keep it in her head that her husband's full name is Edward, not Edmund...
...He suffers so you don't have to...
...But this new movie's effort to replace the painful social comedy of 1972 with the more palatable comedy of humiliation is a creative failure, even though it will almost certainly translate into box-office success...
...But most of the things that happen to Eddie could only happen to a character in a Farrelly Brothers movie...
...But the nagging, unforgettable point of the original is that there is no girl for Lenny, and never will be—that Lenny is a person with an unsatisfiable appetite because there's nothing inside him to nourish...
...What the Farrelly Brothers have done is to retain the outline of the original movie's plot while turning it upside down—Eddie gets the golden girl to begin with, only to discover that she's a ghoul...
...They get married quickly, and before they've consummated their relationship, because she's been threatened with a job transfer to Holland...
...What he finds out about her on the honeymoon is that she's a former cocaine addict who's $27,000 in debt and doesn't even really have a job...
...Indeed, everything in the 1972 Heartbreak Kid could actually have happened, and doubtless has on many occasions: Doesn't everybody know one person who had a honeymoon so disastrous that it ended the marriage...
...And this movie's merciless portrait of tacky Jews is only equaled by its vicious portrait of soulless WASPs...
...The drive from New York to Florida for their honeymoon is a nightmare...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 5
