The Heartbreak KidWhat an incredible movie. Why
isn't May more celebrated than she is? Too searing in tone maybe? It's certainly painful in its extreme bleakness though I laughed aloud quite a lot.
But I can't stop thinking about it. As sharply insightful as it is about the soullessness of the American dream and about relationships, it's hard to get away from. It takes that self-justifying pursuit of one's own dreams - that grandiose idea that anything and everyone is worth sacrificing for that dream - and skewers it, offering us a vision of the dream really is, a veritable pig on a stick, an apple in its mouth, and its blank eyes gazing at nothing. It's funny and it's horrible.
Grodin is so perfectly cast. His smile - it has this pasted on feel, even in the moments when he's supposed to be at his happiest, when his dream of the most perfect girl and most perfect life is most fully coming to fruition.
And the song, "They Long To Be (Close To You)," like Lenny's smile, straining to be sincere, and so effectively used - its lyrics becoming ever more deeply, horribly ironic with each repetition: shouted with desperate semblance of happiness during that symbol of American freedom, the roadtrip, and murmured, later, in the wake of the perfect wedding.
Throughout, May never backs away from a scene, letting it play out in all of its awkwardness until each becomes more unbearable and more brilliant (and funny).
And nobody here, even the characters whom we might find most true, most sympathetic, least hypocritical, gets off. Lila marries the dream, not the reality, as much as anyone, and bakes and burns. And for all his cynicism, Mr. Cocoran (the brilliant Eddie Albert - oh that scene when he, with a still dignified but panicked hurriedness, pushes the boat away from the dock!) is as shallow and soullessly self-satisfied as anyone. When money won't buy off the person whom he perceives will damage his notion of the perfect life and perfect daughter and perfect marriage, he simply absorbs the problem. And nothing, really, has changed for anyone.
As deep as anyone gets is revealed as merely a pretentious college student's notion of vulnerability, nakedness without sex. And Lenny and Kelly are thrilled by their own shallow profundity.
And that final scene and moment. As I asked on Letterboxd, Why is the final shot of this film not as celebrated as the final shot of
The Graduate? Following the biting, tone-perfect brilliance of what comes before it, that final shot, those final moments, Lenny and us left in the blank of what he has chosen and of who he is, is just as savagely insightful as what Nichols offers us.
Noticed A New Leaf scheduled on TCM the other day and because of the love for the film from many of you Filmspotters, I hit record on the DVR. I'm so glad I did. Totally delightful, sweet and funny with a sharp edge.
. . .
Thanks, Filmspotting comrades, for what I'm sure will be one of my "top discoveries of 2013"
If
A New Leaf was one my discoveries of 2013,
The Heartbreak Kid will definitely be on my discoveries of 2015 list.