Movie Review: The Break-Up and Friends With Money: Men and Women Without Qualities - Page 2

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.

I doubt there's another actor with comparable range who has gone as unrewarded as Vaughn. In Return to Paradise (1998), which features his most mature lead performance, he does the redeemed Bogart cynic with greater texture than Bogart himself (who was, after all, a creature of the studio factory system, with its limitations on form and substance). Vaughn is both more romantic and more believably self-protecting than the unflappable, tough-guy hero of Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944).

With his height, his broad, handsome face, and his watchful eyes, Vaughn has the makings of a great screen actor. And there are moments even in The Break-Up, particularly in a scene toward the end after Gary has blown off Brooke's conciliatory gesture and tries to talk to her, when his face is magnetizing. You witness the adolescent male feeling empathy for the first time and being spooked while understanding right away how important it is.

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 …

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