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Peyton Reed's The Break-Up

by The Bridge
06/07/2006

As Hollywood(tm) brand Super Fantasies go, The Break-Up rates about a seven on a one-to-tenner, with My Big Fat Greek Wedding exemplifying a ten and, say, Leaving Las Vegas reading as one. I'm not talking artistic merit here - this is just a scale for measuring the escapism factor. While The Break-Up does take leads Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn all the way to splitsville, with plenty of venom along the way, it's no War of the Roses.

What works here is the cast. Jennifer Aniston (as Brooke) and Vince Vaughn (as Gary) have had an offscreen romance - both with each other and the press - that had many of us civilians almost wishing Tom Cruise would do something flakey again, but it translates into good onscreen chemistry. Plus, whether you're a Friends fan or not, and even though the whole "You're so money" Swingers schtick got old with a quickness, it's hard not to respect the way Vaughn and Aniston can work a gag. I can't for the life of me remember one genuinely funny line from the script - this isn't prize-winning dialogue they're working with. But the movie's gag motor coasts on the likeability of its stars. Plus, there's decent cameos in the form of Jon Favreau, as the jilted Gary's best friend, and Cole Hauser as his wonderfully weird brother, Lupus.

Despite the plot's "twist" on the usual rom-com set-up, the movie slips into sugar-coated third-act shenanigans before too long. Jon Favreau's character, after spending most of the movie acting the boorish, asshole-enabler (he encourages paranoid fantasies that Brooke has been sleeping around) does a sudden one-eighty and suggests Gary learn to be more vulnerable and give more, or some such nonsense. Wha-at? Fifteen minutes later he's back to his (funnier, more believable) best-friend character, offering to "take care of" a potential new suitor of Brooke's. In another puzzling instance of characer reversal, Brooke's boss - a dragon-lady art gallery owner - responds to her on-the-spot resignation with advice on where to find a hottie in Rome and the assurance that her chic job will be waiting for her whenever she returns. These little inconsistancies are obviously the work of harried writers forcing plot points, and it undermines the story.

But overall, is this movie really about respectable story-telling, or believable relationships? Its hard-working actors might want it to be, but the Hollywood juggernaut that is celebrity gossip won't let it happen. This is about the fact that Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn are copulating, just like Mr. and Mrs. Smith was about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. That's why they had to hint at reconciliation in the final scene, even thought the thing is called The Break-Up. The suits in Cali are no dummies, and they know what's selling. These days, People magazine is moving way more product than any movie theater. With the entertainment market sliced as thinly as it is, betwixt yer DVDs and MP3s and whatnot, profit is made through cross-marketing, and nothing sells like "realtiy" - the reality of tan, thin, rich starlets and who they're sleeping with. It doesn't matter if The Break-Up is any good - what matters is, who's Aniston gonna dump Vaughn for?