The Heartbreak Kid
Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly
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. 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. The drive from New York to Florida for their honeymoon is a nightmare. The sex is lousy. Lila is annoying with her clumsy affection and repellent when it comes to her eating habits.
When they arrive in Miami Beach, Lila gets a gruesome sunburn that confines her to their hotel room. Lenny goes down to the beach alone and encounters a flirtatious co-ed played by Cybill Shepherd. He spends a couple of days flirting back, never telling her he’s married and spinning wild lies about his absences to his wife. 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. 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.
Nobody here is even remotely attractive. We only feel for Lila because she is pathetic. Cybill Shepherd’s character is beautiful but unpleasant. Her father is an anti-Semitic jerk. Lenny is one of the most distasteful protagonists in motion-picture history. And this movie’s merciless portrait of tacky Jews is only equaled by its vicious portrait of soulless WASPs. Aristotle said comedy offers a vision of the “painlessly ugly,” but then Aristotle died 2500 years before The Heartbreak Kid, the most painful American comedy ever made.
It probably seemed like an inspired idea to star Ben Stiller in a remake of The Heartbreak Kid. Stiller has become one of the most financially successful performers in box-office history by specializing in the comedy of humiliation. He suffers so you don’t have to. 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.
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. This is not surprising, since it was cowritten and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, who also made that landmark comedy with Stiller. It’s much easier to take than the original. 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.
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. 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. She doesn’t slobber the way the original Lila does; she spews food and juice through her nostrils because she destroyed her nose with coke.
She’s not an awkward virgin but a demonic bed partner with a sadomasochistic streak. And she’s so dumb that she can’t keep it in her head that her husband’s full name is Edward, not Edmund. When Lila gets her sunburn (in Cabo San Lucas, not Miami), Eddie meets and falls for a brunette named Miranda. She’s not crass and obnoxious the way Cybill Shepherd’s WASP dream was; she’s sporty and fun and seems like a lovely person in every way.
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. The less glamorous and more down-to-earth woman is the one for him. 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. 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. 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.
Most telling, though, is that everybody knows someone like Lenny. 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? But most of the things that happen to Eddie could only happen to a character in a Farrelly Brothers movie. The emotional ruthlessness 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.
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) is a movie so difficult to watch at times that you never want to see it twice. 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.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
