There's something about vulgarity

October 05, 2007|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

In 1972's "The Heartbreak Kid," Charles Grodin played a New York Jew who dumps his wife on their Miami Beach honeymoon so he can pursue the blond Minnesota coed he meets at their resort. The movie, directed by Elaine May from Neil Simon's adaptation of a Bruce Jay Friedman short story, is unpolished, oddly broad, and not always believable. And yet it still has a quiet, scathing power about Jewish self-loathing. The Grodin character is a selfish boor who really does break his new wife's heart.

This much louder, more vulgar version of the movie from Bobby and Peter Farrelly has Ben Stiller in the Grodin role, and it starts off asking a much different question. Does a single 40-year-old man yearn for marriage the way some women do? Eddie lives in San Francisco, hangs out with his horndog father (Jerry Stiller) and his best friend (Rob Corddry), for whom marriage is a kind of indentured servitude. Eddie's loneliness is a source of comic humiliation. At the wedding of an ex, he gets seated at the singles table, and he's the only person over the age of 15.

Eventually Eddie meets a tall blonde named Lila (Malin Akerman) outside a laundromat (her purse has just been snatched), and they fall in love. Soon a glitch arrives: Her environmental-research job requires a move to Rotterdam. But her company doesn't force married couples to go. So after six weeks together, Eddie decides to marry her. The Farrellys, who share screenwriting credit with Leslie Dixon, Scot Armstrong, and Kevin Barnett, show Eddie really weighing the decision (his father and his buddy bean him with their opinions). So it makes sense when he agrees to become a husband - it's a rare chance at happiness. But not long after these two drive down to Cabo San Lucas, the movie stops being an exploration of a bachelor's soul and, for better and worse, starts becoming a Farrelly brothers movie.