The Heartbreak Kid (1972) vs. The HeartbreakKid (2007)

Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid is such an overwhelmingly black comedy that I cannot think of another movie to even approach its level of discomfort until Scorsese made The King of Comedy a full decade later. Charles Grodin has never been better nor more excruciating, and May's improv-based style allows the situation to grow even more unsettling as characters morph into human beings that break away from the limiting perspective of Grodin's obliviously manipulative protagonist. It is one of the best comedies of all time.

But so, to my surprise, is the Farrelly brothers' remake of the film, which trades the complex character interactions of the original for their trademark gross-out humor. There's Something About Mary contained an unexpected critique of misogyny, and The Heartbreak Kid takes it even further. Ben Stiller turns his usual bumbling but "lovable" character on its head, making him out to be a monster who uses women without remorse in pursuit of his own stunted ideas of self-fulfillment. Grodin's Lenny got married just to get laid, but Eddie gets married to prevent his lover from going off to pursue her own dreams. If the comedy of the film is lighter, the tone is no less savage.

My full comparison of the two films is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Greenberg

Noah Baumbach may be the definitive observer of millennial life in bourgeois America, which is about as scathing an indictment as anyone can level at a group of people. Baumbach's characters are vain, neurotic, deeply unlikable and capable of meticulously enumerating everyone's character flaws but their own. As much as I hate them, I'm occasionally drawn in by the fascination of recognizing real people, even myself, in these characters.

There are moments in Greenberg where I fidgeted from the discomfort of seeing what could be myself and some of my friends 20 years from now, ranting vacuously about the most minor of inconveniences. But where The Squid and the Whale built its characters into something that stuck with me, Greenberg never coalesced into anything but a circular bore, looping around the same vignette over and over and changing only the setting to keep things fresh.

Baumbach makes a point of this initially, opening not on the neurotic Roger Greenberg who gives the film its title but Florence (Greta Gerwig), the personal assistant of Roger's brother Phillip. She drives around running errands for her boss, who's preparing for an extended business vacation in Vietnam with his family. While he's gone, Phillip will let Roger, freshly released from a mental hospital, stay in the place and look after the family dog, pretentiously named Mahler.

By focusing almost exclusively on Florence in the beginning, Baumbach slyly sets up the endless routine of her life, running errands for one Greenberg brother who treats her like family, then ultimately running around to care for Roger (who, among his other hangups, does not drive). The key difference is that Roger treats her not like a part of the family but a romantic interest, finding the middle ground between Phillip's tasking and the casual hookups Florence has to get over a vaguely defined "long relationship."

Florence is such an interesting character and played so brilliantly by Gerwig, one of the best and most under-appreciated actors of her generation, that the film loses its spark when it shifts to Roger's perspective. With no disrespect to Ben Stiller, who truly gives a great performance here, his character is so purposefully hollow that the tattered and frayed (and believable) humanity of Florence looks even more appealing but is held out of reach.

Roger spends his days attempting to do nothing, something we can intuit he has been preparing for these last 40 years. Stiller keeps his neuroticism in check, expunging Roger's quirks through letters to companies that annoy him. He even sends a letter back home to New York addressed to Mayor Bloomberg, calling for a ban on honking car horns save for "emergency situations." He meets old friends who may look down on Roger's inane life path but are no better; we first see them at a children's party lounging on sofas and drinking. His estranged best friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), still resents Roger ruining a record deal for their old band but works to get his own life back together and sees forgiving his friend as a way to move forward.

At times, Greenberg is hilarious in its deadpan style, such as Roger bitching about a man in a restaurant speaking loudly, only to scream obscenities in embarrassment when Ivan has the waiters sing him "Happy Birthday." The subplot involving the family dog's mysterious illness gets old, but the panic it gives Roger is amusing for a time. Best of all is the quiet humor of Roger and Florence's first hookup, involving two people so awkward that they end up having a frank discussion about relationships and sex without realizing it, then dipping back into their halting advances.

But so many other moments fall flat. Mahler's sickness drags on for the length of the film, to the point that I felt the dog was supposed to be a metaphor (and it is, in the most intangible and lazy way possible). Making a film about a man trapped in a cycle offers the dangerous likelihood of revolving around the same scenario, which Greenberg does ad nauseam. The film hits a nadir at a party Roger throws for his 20-year-old niece about to leave for Australia. As he snorts coke to feel cool again, Roger delivers a cringe-worthy monologue about "kids today" that is so bad I can only pray Baumbach intended it with an ironic bent but so sincerely presented and delivered that there exists the awful possibility he means it.

Stiller, good as he is, is stuck with a character whose quirks come off as quirks. His letter-writing, OCD and stunted adolescence never add up into a human being. Gerwig, on the other hand, gives the best kind of performance, the kind that is transparent and real. There's no distinction between Gerwig and Florence. Far from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of most indie films, Florence is an aching soul, and even -- especially -- when she smiles, she conveys a sense of loneliness and pain that is rending. To look at her is to see that funny, sweet friend you had in high school who was so approachable you never really thought about dating her only to wonder about it after everyone went their separate ways. Without any big crying moments or monologues, Gerwig takes that person into her twenties, when it seems the world itself has taken the same approach as the guys in high school: everyone loves her, but in a way she's too real for anyone to handle. She isn't a projection, a fantasy, a charity case or any other distortion of reality. She's just her, and the world doesn't know what to do with such a phenomenon.

Gerwig captures this so flawlessly that, were the film about her, it may well have been my favorite of the year, or at least in the upper echelon. But even Baumbach cannot adequately give her the moment she deserves, instead focusing on the tired clichés of Greenberg's character. Roger has cynical truisms like "Life is wasted on people," but Florence cannot be summarized so easily. It's almost as if Baumbach made a great and compelling character in spite of himself and didn't recognize it until he could do nothing about it. Or maybe Gerwig's effortless naturalism made lemonade out of lemon seeds.

I found some of the lighter touches in Greenberg intriguing, such as the generational statement made by Phillip and his family going to Vietnam not only on vacation but to start a hotel chain there. Furthermore, Gerwig gives one of the year's best performances as Florence, and Stiller puts in some of his finest work. But it just doesn't add up. The subplot of Ivan's wife and Roger's old crush (played by Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also got a "story by" co-credit) fizzles, as does the Mahler story. Yet it is the failure of the narrative to progress until suddenly the protagonist jumps forward at the end that truly seals Greenberg's fate. And when the film ends on the suspense of listening to a confession on a voicemail, I could not bring myself to care even though Florence was directly involved. Perhaps what disappoints me most about Greenberg is how close it comes to being a unique and captivating film, only to pull away each time it nears the line.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

With the recent demise of At the Movies, various clips of classic arguments, pans and raves have received regular play on blogs. One of the most frequently cited, and truly one of the finest moments of the program, is the hilarious split between Siskel & Ebert for the abysmal early '90s comedy Cop and a Half. Siskel, essentially speaking for the nation, hated the film, and his open-faced astonishment at Ebert's thumbs up conveyed the collective reaction of the audience. Cop and a Half became an occasional reference point in the pair's arguments for the last five years of their partnership, possibly replacing Siskel's fondness for fat jokes when looking for an easy jab at his rival.

Yet Ebert's obstinate refusal to feel bad about liking the film, even years later, reveals something important about dumb comedies: if you laugh, you've got to give them a positive write-up. And, God help me, few contemporary screen comedians make me laugh as hard as Will Ferrell. Yes, dear reader, he does the same thing in every film, and at times his shtick wears dangerously thin, but when he works, he works brilliantly. There's something enticing about coiled-spring comedy, in which a mild-mannered individual calmly reacts to the world until suddenly exploding in pent-up rage. Some excel at this (John Cleese, Jason Lee), others simply come off as deranged (Adam Sandler, to a lesser extent Chris Farley). Ferrell is one who can manage it, presenting a thick-headed veneer of unflappable confidence and pride until someone finally points out what a fool he is, setting in motion the eruption.

With Ron Burgundy, Ferrell has a prime vehicle for communicating this talent. Set in the '70s, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy draws a broad caricature of a man with the intersecting lines of the "Me Generation" and the egotistical realm of the TV personality. Ron Burgundy doesn't do any reporting or fact-checking; furthermore, he seems barely literate, only just capable of reading what's placed on a teleprompter without ever stopping to make sure what is scrolling is correct or even logical. All he has going for him is a mustache made for television, and he acts like the arbiter of truth.

Anchorman, despite being set a decade later and being released four years earlier, almost seems like a preemptive parody of Mad Men: Ron, along with his chauvinist colleagues Champ (David Koechner), Brian (Paul Rudd) and functionally retarded Brick (Steve Carell), act remarkably like Don Draper and co. They drink in the office, act as if no law can bind them and hit on every woman in the office as if there solely as a sexual outlet. So self-absorbed are the men that, when the program's boss (Fred Willard) tells the gang that the network wants more "diversity" on the news staff, Ron believes that the word refers to "an old, old wooden ship from the Civil War era."

Casting Christina Applegate as Veronica, the ambitious reporter who benefits from this rearrangement, was a stroke of genius. Applegate's talents can be hit and miss, but when she's on, she can throw back anything chucked at her by a gaggle of male comedians, even when playing the stereotypically career-driven woman who just needs the love of a boorish man to set her on the "proper" life track of a woman. That aspect of the film is as much a joke as anything else, and it's nice that Applegate's most absurd moments involve her falling for an idiot like Ron instead of the film ever trying to sell this as a positive view of relationships.

There is an intense danger in attempting to tie higher aims to films with such Neanderthal premises, but this goofy vision of '70s local news has a smart side to it. Anchorman's placement as the first in the incomplete "Mediocre American Man" trilogy was fortuitously timed to the celebration of mediocrity and incompetence that defined the zeitgeist of the Bush administration, and Bush provided Ferrell with his biggest break on Saturday Night Live. Looking back, the endless jokes on Bush's stupidity that Ferrell conveyed during the 2000 campaign seem frothy and lightweight, little jabs thrown at a man with not much background to speak of even as the governor of a state. But jump forward eight years to Ferrell's taped one-man show, in which he trotted out the Bush character for one last run before sending him out to pasture (or behind a shed). You're Welcome America had the same focal point -- Bush's astonishing ignorance even after eight years on the job -- but what had once been cheeky now seemed vicious and outraged. No longer was Ferrell amused that a moron was running for high office; now he couldn't believe that the country had allowed such a man to run riot for nearly a decade. (In the final scene, Anchorman takes this one step further by saying that Brick would go on to be one of Bush's top advisers, an act that both homages Animal House and caters to this admittedly stretched view of the movie.)

This film, made in 2004, conveys some of that disgust, far removed as it is from politics. The outrage over a woman penetrating the homoerotic inner circle ("It is anchor-MAN, not anchor-LADY, and that is a scientific fact!" screams a belligerent Champ) shows men acting like children. Nearly all of the film's humor stems from jokes at Ron's expense, from his arrogance that is unjustified by either physical attractiveness or mental acuity to his dated belief in what's proper for women. Veronica fights to be seen as an equal, resenting the fluff pieces she gets assigned to by sexist bosses, but Ron's stories are no more important. Only Ron's gravitas makes his items seem vital, but he reports on water-skiing squirrels and the odd wild animal sighting. If this film comments on the pride Americans take in ignorance, then this angle can be seen as an attack on the vacuity of news programs and their perennial inability to cover relevant topics in favor of pandering to the broadest demographic for ratings. The Channel 4 news team thinks a panda giving birth is national news in the wake of Watergate, just as CNN now devotes increasingly less time to anything important and flounders about looking for some trite human-interest piece to save ratings. Hell, even the hysterical rivalry between news channels (other factions led by Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, even Tim Robbins) resembles the incessant pissing contest between 24-hour news channels, and Channel 4's pure arrogance and pride for their drivel matches Fox's own.

Oh, but why weigh down the film with such a reading when its enjoyment lies in its absurdity and its endless one-liners? Quite so, but I believe that Anchorman's cleverness runs deeper than its surface titters. Satire, it ain't, but out of all the pictures put out by Adam McKay and his various collaborators in the subset of the Apatow talent pool, this is by far the most fully realized and insanely re-watchable, precisely because there's some overarching plan to all of this. It may not be an expulsion of the filmmakers' political angst, but the derth of a point that makes Talladega Nights only intermittently entertaining is wholly absent here. Apart from an ending that must surely have come to the gang while under the influence of controlled substances, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy remains one of the funniest and best-cast comedies of the last decade, so funny that even a long-ass collection of outtakes could be haphazardly fashioned into a "sequel" that is also riotous. Maybe it can rise no higher than the status of "lazy Sunday" film, but aren't the movies just so much better when they bring you out of boredom anyway? Stay classy.