The Break-Up review

2006.06.20 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

In The Break-Up, we see two people who never belonged together but who love each other anyway beat each other up for a couple of hours, and yet somehow it's funny. In fact, maybe it's funny because of it. It's not a romantic comedy; it's an unromantic comedy.

Vince Vaughn is a selfish doofus with no more ambition than to help his brothers with their city tour business (he's the self-described "talent") and no appreciation for his girlfriend's love of the arts. Jennifer Aniston works in an art gallery (as classy broads do) but still acts like she belongs in that Friday's uniform from Office Space.

Jon Favreau is Vaughn's equally dense bartender friend and gets a couple of good scenes in which he tells Vaughn what a jerk he actually is, even to his guy friends. He also gets a hilarious scene in which he plans a kind of Strangers-on-a-Train scheme to dispose of Aniston's new man and misinterprets Vaughn's denials as merely alibi-building. This reverses the roles from their break-out hit Swingers, in which it was Vaughn trying to cheer up Favreau after a break-up; and Favreau shows he's got the chops to pull it off.

Joey Lauren Adams is Aniston's best friend, married with a couple of kids, and clearly much more emotionally stable. Peter Billingsly (the kid who wanted a BB gun in A Christmas Story) is her similarly stable husband and does a nice job with hardly a single line.

Vincent D'Onofrio has a great role as Vaughn's possibly-semi-autistic older brother, who actually does all the work around the tour business office. I got the impression that he made the character much more interesting than it was written. John Michael Higgins (harking back to his role in A Mighty Wind) counters nicely as Aniston's brother, who is obsessed with a cappella singing. Jason Bateman falls a little flat as the friend who is also a real estate agent who would really like not to take a commission.

The movie is directed by Peyton Reed, who has had a hit-or-miss career with the likes of Bring It On and Down With Love and TV's Upright Citizen's Brigade. But his quirky, meta-referential humor works here, avoiding the usual pitfalls of romantic comedy. The break-up is almost as much Aniston's fault as Vaughn's (she actually makes an effort to get back together before it's too late), and the oneupsmanship is not taken to ridiculous extremes (she goes on a couple of dates; he has a pizza and strip poker party).

Reed doesn't always get the best out of his actors; Bateman isn't the only one with a clunker scene; he's just the only one with only one big scene. Aniston's co-worker at the gallery is nothing more than painful schtick; Vaughn's other brother is a throwaway; and Aniston's dates might as well be replaced by vases full of flowers.

"So, what do you do for a living?"

[cut to vase full of flowers]

"Oh, that's interesting."

The film is all about the break-up; the good times flash by in a slide show while the opening credits roll. That's fine by me, since the good times are not relevant to how the relationship breaks down. Aniston and Vaughn both do a very good job in their roles, helped along by the terrific material.

The screenplay is the work of newcomers Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, with story help from Vince Vaughn. The dialog is as real as it is funny, with Vaughn spouting some terrific—and completely insensitive—guy logic to Aniston's wishy-washy overbearingness. We like both of them and wish it would work out—and we get the feeling it could.

I get the feeling that the film-makers were hoping the movie would strike up a debate among couples about who was more in the wrong, but the story they tell is too much of an unfortunate event to make the audience "pick a side," as the tagline suggests.

My only regret is that, while Vaughn gets a scene where he is told outright what his problem is (he doesn't care about what other people want), Aniston never quite gets that (she expects people to know what she wants and to do them to make her happy). They both have their moments of enlightenment, but only when it's too late; that's a touching scene because—unlike your garden variety rom-com—there's no turning back from this break-up.

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