Movie Review: The Break-Up and Friends With Money: Men and Women Without Qualities

Peyton Reed's The Break-Up

The Break-Up begins at a baseball game where Gary (Vince Vaughn), a motor-mouth Cubs fan, hits on Brooke (Jennifer Aniston), a woman on a date with another guy whom he notices because she's sitting between him and the hot dog vendor. Gary is overbearing but Brooke couldn't ask for a guy to fasten more attention on her. So his hopped-up patter works, as we see in a series of still photos under the credits showing the progression of their relationship as they party, meet each other's friends, join a couples' bowling team, and move in together. When the movie proper starts, they've been together two years and have reached the point where she thinks that he takes her for granted and he thinks that all she does is nag him.

They're both right, and if that isn't bad enough, when Brooke says she's done with the relationship, hoping to shock Gary into listening to her, and he takes her at her word, they begin to fight like overgrown children. Neither one can afford the mortgage loan payments on their condo alone, so they both stay and mark out their territory, squabble, try to make each other jealous, etc. It's reminiscent of a screwball divorce comedy—e.g., The Awful Truth (1937), in which Cary Grant and Irene Dunne each tries, successfully, to break up the other's new engagement—but without charm or flair or elegance. Yet while The Break-Up is as grating as spending time with bickering couples is in life (and, as a friend has to tell Brooke and Gary, it is very grating), the movie doesn't have the veracity of naturalism.

The movie could conceivably work if it viewed Brooke and Gary's immaturity from an ironic remove. This is especially true if Brooke's manipulation and Gary's defensive hostility are supposed to be funny. Brooke's confidante Addie (Joey Lauren Adams) periodically suggests such a perspective, but the moviemakers don't realize that it damns the bulk of their material. The Break-Up wouldn't have to be as antically depraved as The War of the Roses (1989), just somewhat more impersonal. Instead, it combines a naked desire to please the audience with a try-anything approach of the kind that made Wedding Crashers such a desperate stab at entertainment. The material involving Brooke's closeted gay brother, for instance, is embarrassing and the material involving the art gallery where she works (for Judy Davis and with Justin Long) excruciating.

Instead, it's plain we're supposed to like Brooke and Gary and wish the best for them—no matter how stupidly they behave. It was thus a disastrous decision to flash the functioning years of their relationship in a montage of stills. We need to see what the relationship is based on if we're going to have any investment in the way it falls apart. Instead, the movie relies entirely on the audience's feelings for the stars.

As for the stars, Vaughn has the better role to the extent that Gary takes less of the infantile initiative and reacts more. Vaughn is in the enviable position of merely having to convey that Gary's feelings aren't what they appear to be. As he showed in last year's Be Cool, Vaughn is an ace at multiple roles within a single character. In Be Cool, Vaughn's Raji is a junior music exec posing as a white-boy-gangsta, i.e., a buffoon, but a conniving and even murderous one. Raji is a joke and he half knows it, which only gives his ludicrous lack of cool an unpredictable volatility. Vaughn makes Raji jumpy with the anxiety of someone trapped in a part that isn't working. You can see the eyes shifting behind the mask and Vaughn suggests these layers while playing the comedy at full tilt. As Raji, Vaughn manages to give essentially concentric performances, a prodigious act that went largely unnoticed.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog