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The Breaker-Upperers
Jul. 11th, 2019 07:25 amThe Breaker-Upperers is a movie with an interesting premise, a number of funny moments, but an overall disappointing execution. The story concerns two best friends, Mel and Jen, who run a business together: the titular Breaker-Upperers, who help couples break up when one half of the couple doesn’t have the guts to say “I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
The movie’s first problem is that it goes with the maximally psychopathic version of this premise. When we first meet Mel and Jen, they’re dressed in fake police uniforms, explaining to a sobbing woman that her boyfriend has gone missing and It Doesn’t Look Good.
This leads into a montage of outrageous break-ups Mel and Jen have precipitated, and it is admittedly hilarious - there’s also an amazing comeuppance later on when Mel and Jen end up in an actual police station, trying to pretend to be real police officers in front of the sobbing woman from the first scene, and it ends with Mel pretending to be a stripper dressed as a police officer as a birthday present with such surprising gusto that it redeems the scene from embarrassment squickiness.
But it also sets the movie’s emotional register at a weird place: basically, once the movie starts to take its emotional beats seriously (when Mel begins to feel bad about their job, which leads her to follow up with the client from the first scene, leading to the stripper incident), it can no longer sustain this over-the-top tone and Jen and Mel begin to look like quite horrible people. When they have their big friendship-ending fight about the ethics of faking people’s deaths to aid in a break-up, it’s hard not to feel that Mel is 100% right - that is pretty horrible! And maybe illegal? - and would probably be better off without Jen. But of course by the end of the movie they’re friends again.
(It’s worth noting, also, that none of the relationships they’re breaking up seem to be abusive. The whole faked-death thing might be more palatable if some of their clients had a better reason for it than “I am so conflict averse that I would rather pretend to die than endure an uncomfortable conversation with my former beloved.”)
Why are Mel and Jen friends anyway? Over the course of the movie we learn that they were both cheated on by the same guy, and their simultaneous break-up with him brought them together, but I feel like we needed something more to explain a joint business venture and fifteen years of friendship.
Now usually when you see a relationship that the movie expects you to root for without giving it any explanation or build-up, it’s a heterosexual romance, so in a way it’s nice to see a movie giving that kind of unthinking support to a female friendship. But on the other hand, this is a completely maddening trope when applied to a heterosexual romance, and making it about a female friendship instead doesn’t actually make it less aggravating.
The movie’s first problem is that it goes with the maximally psychopathic version of this premise. When we first meet Mel and Jen, they’re dressed in fake police uniforms, explaining to a sobbing woman that her boyfriend has gone missing and It Doesn’t Look Good.
This leads into a montage of outrageous break-ups Mel and Jen have precipitated, and it is admittedly hilarious - there’s also an amazing comeuppance later on when Mel and Jen end up in an actual police station, trying to pretend to be real police officers in front of the sobbing woman from the first scene, and it ends with Mel pretending to be a stripper dressed as a police officer as a birthday present with such surprising gusto that it redeems the scene from embarrassment squickiness.
But it also sets the movie’s emotional register at a weird place: basically, once the movie starts to take its emotional beats seriously (when Mel begins to feel bad about their job, which leads her to follow up with the client from the first scene, leading to the stripper incident), it can no longer sustain this over-the-top tone and Jen and Mel begin to look like quite horrible people. When they have their big friendship-ending fight about the ethics of faking people’s deaths to aid in a break-up, it’s hard not to feel that Mel is 100% right - that is pretty horrible! And maybe illegal? - and would probably be better off without Jen. But of course by the end of the movie they’re friends again.
(It’s worth noting, also, that none of the relationships they’re breaking up seem to be abusive. The whole faked-death thing might be more palatable if some of their clients had a better reason for it than “I am so conflict averse that I would rather pretend to die than endure an uncomfortable conversation with my former beloved.”)
Why are Mel and Jen friends anyway? Over the course of the movie we learn that they were both cheated on by the same guy, and their simultaneous break-up with him brought them together, but I feel like we needed something more to explain a joint business venture and fifteen years of friendship.
Now usually when you see a relationship that the movie expects you to root for without giving it any explanation or build-up, it’s a heterosexual romance, so in a way it’s nice to see a movie giving that kind of unthinking support to a female friendship. But on the other hand, this is a completely maddening trope when applied to a heterosexual romance, and making it about a female friendship instead doesn’t actually make it less aggravating.
