The Heartbreak Kid

Lenny Cantrow gets married and drives to Miami for the honeymoon. On the first day of the trip he decides how irritating his wife is. When she is burnt by the sun and confined to the room, he meets Kelly on the beach and decides to build a new life before the honeymoon is over. Elaine May directs. Neil Simon wrote the screenplay from a story by Bruce Jay Friedman. Charles Grodin plays Lenny, Jeannie Berlin plays his wife Lila, Cybill Shepherd plays Kelly. Jeannie Berlin is Elaine May's daughter. She was nominated for the supporting actress Oscar, and Eddie Albert was nominated for supporting actor. The discomfort is deliberate. Lenny is not a sympathetic protagonist and the film never justifies him; you watch a man abandon his wife step by step, and the comedy comes precisely out of that shame. May's method is to run scenes too long. Conversations do not stop where they should, and the characters keep talking until they have humiliated themselves. It is the shared property of all her films. It was remade in 2007 by the Farrelly brothers with Ben Stiller, and became an entirely different film. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies American comedy and black humour that makes you uncomfortable. Who it is not for: the protagonist is genuinely repellent and the film offers no consolation, and the last scene is deliberately cold.