Breaking Up is Hard to View

There is a strange kind of irony at work in the Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn vehicle "The Break-Up", though it has nothing to do with the script or the performances. It's a kind of "meta-irony" around watching two likeable actors, who are a romantically linked in real-life, playing a couple on-screen with absolutely zero chemistry. The conceit of the film is that, after their break-up, neither member of the couple wants to move out of the wonderful condo they own together and so they try to co-exist in the same space with, apparently, hilarious results. The writers would like us to believe that Gary (Mr. Vaughn) and Brooke (Ms. Aniston) hold onto their apartment because neither can accept the finality of their relationship's demise, but the two are so mismatched that, as a homeowner, I'd say it's really just the condo. Since the horror of losing a beautiful apartment is the only truth to be found in the film, "The Break-Up" ends up saying more about real estate than relationships.

The problem (one of the many) with the script by newcomers Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender - from a story they co-wrote with Mr. Vaughn - is that it never makes clear why Brooke is with Gary in the first place. After the meet-cute - during which Gary comes off as a sociopath forcing a hot dog, and then himself, on Brooke - the film shows us a perfunctory slideshow of happier times (cookouts, costume parties, etc) before plunging the pair into an escalating, and fairly realistic, argument that starts with lemons and ends with an ultimatum.

From then on the characters attempt, in increasingly cliché - and sometimes downright mean - ways to make each other jealous. The screenplay aspires to be a "War of the Roses" but it has neither the wit nor the darkness to pull it off (though, for the record, I never liked "Roses" that much). The motor-mouthed Mr. Vaughn can be extremely funny and the perky Ms. Aniston has shown acting chops before in The Good Girl, to say nothing of her ten years on "Friends". But the script gives Mr. Vaughn few moments of his trademark motor-mouthed monologues and instead makes Gary almost entirely selfish and unlovable. Only his friend Lupus, who appears to be a borderline psycho, comes off worse. The rules of the romantic comedy (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back) dictate that we must want these two characters to get back together, but Gary and Brooke are so mismatched that, when the titular event occurs, we breathe a sigh of relief that Ms. Aniston can get on with her life.

Peyton Reed directs the film at the sitcom level which the material deserves and there are some fun supporting characters particularly in the sibling department, with Vincent D'Onofrio as Gary's social inept brother and business partner and John Michael Higgins as Brooke's a cappella-loving brother. But how did the film go so wrong? If Ms. Aniston and Mr. Vaughn are really a couple, there must be something interesting going on between them. Couldn't some of that have made it onto screen instead of the trite Mars-Venus differences (he likes the sports, she likes the ballet) we've seen a hundred times before? At one point Brooke's art gallery boss, played with over-the-top gusto by Judy Davis, compares winning a man back to "paint-by-numbers". She might just as easily have been referring to this film. It goes through the motions of a romantic comedy without any of the heart. Some relationships, and some films, it seems, aren't worth saving.