Impossible Dream
By J.C.
THE HEARTBREAK KID
Directed by ELAINE MAY
Screenplay by NEIL SIMON
This is an eccentrically funny movie, often cutting and poignant at the same time. It suffers from miscalculations and the kind of dizzy errors that might have leveled another undertaking; but Elaine May, both as a film maker (A New Leaf) and a performer, is someone from whom we have come to expect a kind of carefree inconsistency. By now it is part of her appeal. She veers effectively, if not exactly smoothly, through wild changes of mood and attitude, from very human comedy to sharp satire to a sort of urchin wistfulness. Her reactions to her characters are so complex and abrupt that the audience is always kept lagging a little behind and slightly off balance. It is an odd sensation, but pleasant.
The Neil Simon script is blessedly free of the frenetic banter of his plays. The plot, taken from Bruce Jay Friedman's short story, A Change of Plan, is a bright comic idea: a man on his honeymoon falls in love with another woman. Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting goods salesman in New York, marries a sweetly vacuous girl named Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin). The wedding is small, echt New York Jewish, with folding chairs in a rented hotel room and piped-in music featuring a recognizable and wildly inappropriate soft-drink jingle.
On the way to the honeymoon in Miami Beach, Lila does little things that start by vaguely irritating her new husband and end by giving him long second thoughts. She talks constantly about what their life will be like after 50 years of marriage, craves chicken salad and postcoital Milky Ways and, on her first day in the sun, bakes herself to a fearful incarnadine. She spends the next couple of days in the hotel room, time enough for Lenny to fall wildly in love with a snippy blonde from Minnesota named Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd).
Lenny is an emotional deadbeat, but he is possessed of singular determination and ambition. He pursues Kelly past the obstacles of her granite father (Eddie Albert) and a divorce from his own weepy Lila, chases her down on campus in Minnesota, where he woos, wins and finally weds her. The ceremony is posh Protestant, the reception elaborate, and that same soft-drink jingle plays brightly in the background.
Deftly played by Charles Grodin, Lenny is a half brother to Alex Portnoy, whose adolescent reverie while he watched "the gentile girls" ice-skating at night ("How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?") might make a good epigraph for The Heartbreak Kid. Lenny's hangdog adoration of Kelly, the definitive homecoming queen, turns him into exactly the kind of chattering fool that Lila was. One of the crucial problems with the movie is that Shepherd, who is ideally icy in the earlier Miami scenes, cannot manage the difficult transition into actually caring for Lenny. Even on the day of the wedding she seems to be putting him on.
The other actors help a great deal. Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter, is adept at playing the same sort of antic stupidity as May and making it not only recognizable but also winning. Eddie Albert is spectacular, a figure to strike terror into any suitor's heart; his character is a combination of George Babbitt and Eric the Red.
Elaine May shares with John Cassavetes a consuming affection for people, foibles and all. She is superb at discovering little incidents or bits of business that take the taint of caricature off a scene and lend it immediacy: a plump lady, a member of the first wedding party, turning her right hip ever so slightly to edge down the aisle; or Lenny, at the second wedding, grinning briefly in involuntary triumph at the minister. May does tend to stress Lenny's obtuseness, his blind selfishness, rather too much. But The Heartbreak Kid survives its faults; indeed it seems almost to defy them. .J.C.
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