The Break-Up

The ad campaign for Universal's new comedy, The Break-Up, would lead you to believe that the film is a sunny, fluffy, joyous comedic romp. Although the movie certainly holds more than its share of laughs, there is also a jagged little pill of honesty and bitterness that is carried throughout. This is what makes The Break-Up stand out more from your average big budget light comedy. Director Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down With Love) has not crafted a light comedy as the trailers would lead you to believe, but a truthful and sometimes even sad depiction of love in its final stages, and the foolish things we can do to destroy it, not realizing our mistakes until it is too late. The film is uneven and a bit too one-sided in the story it tells, but it is also highly entertaining, and one of the more watchable romantic comedies (if you can call it that) I've seen in a while.

The movie gets its prerequisite "meet cute" scene out of the way right at the beginning when Chicago couple Gary (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) meet at a baseball game. He hosts bus tours of the city, and she works at a modern art gallery. The two seem to be a perfect couple as we witness during the opening credit montage of various photos of happy memories, including their wedding. Flash forward a couple years later to the present, and like in many relationships, the cracks are beginning to show in its seemingly perfect facade. He's a lazy slob who likes to spend his time doing nothing but watching sports on TV and playing Grand Theft Auto, and she's reaching the end of her rope, as she feels he doesn't appreciate her and everything she does, nor does he help out enough around the house. Scene by scene, we watch the cracks grow until finally, Brooke has snapped and just can't handle anymore. We're only 15 minutes into the movie, and we're already at the "boy looses girl" scene which usually comes at about the 60 or 70 minute mark of your standard romantic comedy.

It seems the only thing the pair knows for certain is that they've had it with each other. Now they have to figure out what to do with everything else, including the spacious condo that they have shared together for the past couple years, and their conflicting emotions of hatred, bitterness, depression, and jealousy of one another. Taking the advice of their individual best friends, the pair tries to make each other jealous by dating people more attractive than each other, or pretending they just don't care. We follow Gary and Brooke through the various stages of their splitting up. Where it all leads to, I will not reveal, but let's just say it was a lot more surprising and honest than what I would expect from a big budget summer comedy.

The Break-Up succeeds for the most part because of its general honesty in dealing with its own tricky subject matter. Even though this is a comedy, this is a very bittersweet one. We don't laugh so much at the situations the characters find themselves in, rather we laugh out of familiarity based on our own experiences. Anyone who has been through some form of prolonged or any kind of separation for that matter is sure to be able to relate to the plights of Gary and Brooke in some way. The film is at its best when it is treating its own subject matter and its characters with respect and dignity. The movie allows plenty of moments for quiet reflection for both of its characters, and these scenes feature some great dramatic work from both Vaughn and Aniston that took me by surprise. And yes, they're successful when they're trying to be funny too. Even though they spend most of their time at odds with each other, the movie wisely avoids the pitfall of making them annoying by constantly bickering or screaming at each other. Yes, they do spend more than one scene screaming at one another, but these scenes are played genuinely and not with broad comedy. I can honestly picture this movie making some audience members uncomfortable, as they might see some of their own personal mistakes in past relationships projected right there on the screen for all the world to see.

Things are not all sorrow and sadness, however, and although the movie does have a number of laugh out loud scenes, the humor also leads to its first big problem. Namely, the supporting characters are sometimes portrayed too broadly simply for the sake of cheap laughs. There's not one, but two flamboyant and effeminate characters (Brooke's brother, and one of her co-workers at the art gallery) that both serve little purpose to the overall story other than to just provide comic relief. They don't seem so out of place that they don't feel like they have no place in the movie, but they do seem kind of like a desperate ploy on the part of the filmmakers to squeeze some easy jokes in and make the audience feel a bit more comfortable. A far more serious offense that holds The Break-Up back a bit is that the script is too one-sided. Gary the husband seems to shoulder pretty much all of the blame for everything that goes wrong between them. He's a fun guy to be around, but he mainly only cares about himself and what he wants to do. He's a slob, he doesn't seem to take things seriously, and quite frankly, you don't really blame Brooke for wanting to leave the guy. Vince Vaughn is able to squeeze out all the likeability he can out of the character, and he does eventually have a change of heart, but still I think the film would have worked even better if Aniston's character was not quite so blame-free.

Sometimes uneven tone aside, the film works mostly because of its lead actors. After a pair of disappointing back-to-back flops (Derailed and Rumor Has It), Jennifer Aniston successfully slips back into a role that she's not only comfortable with, but is quite likeable in. She has some funny dialogue, and also gets to show off some dramatic skills as well. Vince Vaughn has a much tougher role to play, since he has to handle Gary's obvious self-centeredness while still making him someone you'd want to watch an entire movie about. He mostly pulls it off, and like Aniston, he gets to play a wide variety of scenes. It's a nice change of pace for Vaughn, who has been stuck playing the same sarcastic comedic character in the past couple films he's done. Of the supporting cast, only Judy Davis as Brooke's boss at the art gallery truly stands out. Her character starts out as a venomous and hateful ice queen, but is later revealed to have a lot more emotion than initially suspected.

The Break-Up is a hard movie to describe. It doesn't work 100% of the time, but it works just enough for me to say that I enjoyed myself while I was watching it. The movie actually managed to take me by surprise, as it has a lot more to say about couples and relationships than you may think. With a tighter and more focused script, I think this movie could have been close to essential viewing for just about anyone in a relationship. As it stands, it will just have to settle for mostly entertaining yet uneven. There's a lot of gold hidden within The Break-Up surrounded by some slightly less desirable elements.

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