CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 06/02/06

It Is Indeed Hard to Do

By matthew reynolds

In this "reverse romcom," where the bickering couple breaks up but continues to live together -- and drive each other crazy -- first-time screenwriters Garelick and Lavender attempt to upend the genre. You know what they say about having your cake and eating it too…

The Break-Up

Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender
Story by Jeremy Garelick, Jay Lavender & Vince Vaughn

We cut right to it: Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) meets Gary (Vince Vaughn) at a Cubs game, and their happy courtship plays out in an opening credits montage. When we drop in on them later in their relationship, he's still one-third of a tour-guide business run by him and his brothers and she works for a prestigious art gallery. A dinner party evolves into bickering, which boils over to the titular break-up. After the dust has settled, neither of them is willing to move out of their sweet apartment, so until it sells, they are forced to cohabitate. What ensues is a war of the wills the likes of which only scorned lovers can muster up.

The Break-Up is a test case for the unique problems associated with writing a truly original romantic comedy. In the quest to show the flaws and foibles of real people going through messy communication problems, the script has forgotten to show us why we should care. It tries to have the best of both worlds -- the dark comedy of The War of the Roses or Ruthless People in the arena of a big summer comedy like Wedding Crashers. The problem is that the comedy isn't dark enough -- what makes dark comedy effective isn't its meanness, although that's part of it. Dark comedy, at its best, exposes elements of our behavior so unsavory that, without a funny spin, they would be almost unbearable to watch. But without any kind of ongoing theme, without that nagging, predictable, but all-too-necessary tension of "Will these two get together?" the film plays like a series of hilarious deleted scenes from a movie you've never seen.

Seeing Brooke and Gary go at each other's throats, Odd Couple-style, is amusing but never reaches a cringe-worthy crescendo on the order of, say, NBC's The Office. That may be because Gary and Brooke are, in fact, so oddly mismatched. You wonder what they ever saw in each other. They act like that boyfriend and girlfriend who met in college and have seriously grown apart, now that Greek functions are over.

Furthermore, for a script supposedly so intent on being original in contrast with standard romantic-comedy conventions, Break-Up still falls into the genre's most persistent trap: it doesn't say anything about relationships. Instead of making a real point about how people drift apart, or making a strong statement about the work that is required to stay together, and whether that work is worth it, the movie relies on the standard broad gags (must every comedy involve waxing?) and breezy trademark Vaughn humor.

It makes you wonder about the different movie this could have been, where the two of them are in fact perfectly matched, where their fighting and vengeful behavior is simply misguided passion, revealing how familiar they were with each other's frailties. In a fairly funny scene, they play Pictionary with friends, and the scene is spot-on in its depiction of that frustrating couple that loses precisely because of their inability to communicate. How interesting it could have been if the two of them grudgingly accepted how well they could communicate, so we could see what it was that drew them together in the first place. Either way, the scene is a squandered opportunity, a TV sketch instead of a portrait of fully developed characters…and all too emblematic of the film's problems as a whole.

As a classic case of trying too hard to be different instead of good, this is tough to recommend for general audiences, but it's practically a must-see for romantic comedy writers, if only as a cautionary tale.

The Break-Up

Universal Pictures
Rated PG-13; 106 min.

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Matthew Reynolds is a former journalist now working in feature film development. He is not responsible for items lost or stolen during the reading of this article.

The Break-Up courtesy Universal Pictures

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