DREADED BLISS : 'Heartbreakers' & 'The Brothers'. - Review - movie review

Commonweal, April 20, 2001 by Rand Richards Cooper

I recently went to two top-grossing new releases for a dose of marriage, money, and morals, Hollywood style. Maybe we're supposed to be relaxing after the high seriousness of the Oscar season. Or maybe it's just that times are flush, and that means comedy.

Heartbreakers follows the exploits of a mother-daughter scam duo specializing in connubial con jobs. The film opens in a lavish church, with Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Dean (Ray Liotta) exchanging vows amid mountains of flowers and the solemn strains of "Ave Maria." Ray Liotta in church means either (a) mob drama or (b) screwball comedy, and with nary a casket or smirking hit man in sight, we're pretty sure it's (b). At the wedding party afterward, Max tortures her amorous bridegroom by dancing with every man in the room, making him wait and wait. At long last he manages to carry her off to the honeymoon suite, where she pops off her dress to reveal lace underwear, teasing him to a frothing desire--then promptly falls asleep. What's a simple guy from Jersey to do?

Actually, Dean is a kind of scamp himself (he runs an automobile chop shop), but alas, he's facing a pair of crooks more devious, and infinitely smarter, than he is. That sassy young office temp he hired a few weeks ago? Little does he know she's actually Max's daughter, Paige (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and when the very next morning she offers relief for his pent-up need--in Heartbreakers, short skirts and low necklines reliably vaporize male scruples--poor Dean barely has himself unzipped when...in walks Max. Outrage and lawyers follow swiftly, and before Dean can say, "I've been had," he's out $300,000 (cash, thank you) and one Mercedes. "How was the wedding, Mom?" Paige asks, as the two power away in the Benz. "Beautiful," says Mom, "like all my weddings." Then it's merrily on to Palm Beach and their next mark, an elderly, bellicose tobacco tycoon (Gene Hackman) who's busily smoking himself to death. Will Max manage to snag him, and Paige seduce him, before he keels over?

Heartbreakers is anything but subtle. Scene after scene showcases Hackman's spasmodic coughing, bilious pallor, and repulsive gray teeth ("I have to kiss that?" Paige complains), while in the background his pet parrot keels over from second-hand smoke. Characterization is achieved mostly by clothing: Hackman, foolish in purple underwear, lime green socks, and garters; Jack, Paige's sweet-souled wannabe boyfriend (Jason Lee), sincere in loose jeans and T-shirt; Weaver, posing as a Russian femme fatale in dominatrix black leather; and, at every turn, the mesmerizing prospect of Hewitt's push-up bra. The movie's soundtrack mixes silky bossa nova with a romping comic theme (by Danny Elfman, whose vaguely demented music graced Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and the Pee Wee Herman movies). It's all light fluff, and it skips along nicely, a hit-or-miss satire that lands the occasional bull's-eye of weirdness, for instance, when Hackman rhapsodizes, "There's nothing sexier than smoke billowing proudly out of a woman's hot, red, engorged nostrils."

My chief gripe isn't that Heartbreakers isn't serious enough, but that it's too serious. What motivates Max's cynical scamming, it turns out, is concern for Paige--that she'll fall in love, and heartache will follow, as it did for Max years before. Director David Mirkin and his trio of screenwriters don't trust their film's breezy amorality; they want it to have a heart of gold.

In a recent New Yorker essay, Anthony Lane wrote that comedy in American movies "has shriveled into a prelude to sincerity: something to be hustled out of the way, almost with embarrassment, to allow warm feelings in." A final twist to Heartbreakers preserves some measure of fun, but the ending is mostly about following the truth of your heart and learning to love. Sure, we all know comedy ends with everyone getting married, but do they all have to be healed as well? Heartbreakers takes a promisingly nasty falling-out among thieves and turns it into family therapy. All mother and daughter really needed, it seems, was love. That's the biggest con of all.

The Brothers also begins with a wedding, a vision of a glowing bride dressed in white, bearing flowers--and a gun. This recurring nightmare has Jackson Smith (Morris Chestnut), a handsome twenty-nine-year-old physician, waking in a cold sweat. "You think a commitment to a woman means death?" his shrink asks him. Yup, pretty much. Jackson is one of four basketball-playing, nightclub-hopping L.A. buddies approaching their thirties with mixed feelings about their fast lifestyle. When one of them, Terry, decides to marry--"From this moment on," he announces, "I'm a one-woman man"--the others react with varying attitudes of admiration, nervousness, and scorn. The pledge launches a series of bull sessions in which the four (and, in parallel, their girlfriends) strategize over matters of the heart, or, in the men's parlance, "Love, happiness, and all that shit."

Central to the comedy are black male pride and the geopolitics of dating. "We're single black professional men," says Brian, a lawyer and the group's most incorrigible womanizer, "we're the cream of the crop." Debuting writer-director Gary Hardwick deploys this inflated sense of self as ammunition in the battle of the sexes. "I'm a doctor," Jackson announces to Denise (Gabrielle Union), a thoughtful (and gorgeous) woman he meets at a party. "Why do you say it like that?" she asks him. "Like, 'I'm Zeus, I'm king of the gods.'" She's on to him, and a romance begins.