THE HEARTBREAK KID (1972) - Elaine May
Elaine May’s masterpiece screened a few weeks ago at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as a part of their Hollywood “Jew Wave” series. Alt Screen compiled excerpts from pieces written over the years singing its praises, among them is this summation of it’s many virtues by Chuck Stephens written for Film Comment in 2006:
“Were there film-historical justice in the world, The Heartbreak Kid (72) would be remembered as something more than a finger-jabbed-a-little-too-sharply-in-the-ribs footnote to The Graduate. An excruciatingly hilarious masterpiece of modern misanthropy, May’s second directorial outing stars Charles Grodin as a newlywed who, not five days into his honeymoon, mercilessly dumps his bride (played, with an Oscar-nominated mixture of hapless pathos and a double order of egg salad, by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin) in order to pursue Cybill Shepherd’s teenage Minnesota WASP princess. An anatomy of internalized rage, curdled misogyny, and bottomless self-deception, May’s second film-as indeed do each of the four films she directed-deserves better. It deserves a fate in which someone like Manny Farber, back when those sorts of evaluations meant something, would have hailed The Heartbreak Kid as nothing less than Taxi Driver in reverse. That way, the suck-hole of oblivion into which May’s all-too-brief filmmaking career seems now largely to have vanished might long since have been fitted with a plug. Even in The Heartbreak Kid, the one film she directed but didn’t take credit for writing, May managed to shift the shape of Neil Simon’s script in a manner so corrosive as to foretell aspects of Schrader and Scorsese’s psycho-cabbie transubstantiation of Bresson’s country priest.”
