The Heartbreak Kid (1972), directed by Elaine May. Trylon microcinema volunteer night, Wednesday, March 15.

Lucky me, I was invited to a super secret 16mm screening of Elaine May’s impossible-to-find masterpiece, The Heartbreak Kid. It’s super secret because the aspirin people, Bristol-Myers, produced movies in the 1970s through a company called Palomar (a lot of corporations were doing this back then.) Palomar eventually folded, and, for whatever reason, this movie’s rights are still held by Bristol-Myers-Squibb (as they’re now called). Why? A lot of the Palomar movies are available (most notably, perhaps, The Taking of Pelham 123), and you wouldn’t think this pharmaceutical company would care. But I guess they do, because you can’t see this damn thing anywhere. You can’t get the rights, you can’t screen it, and I guess everyone’s afraid of lawsuits. Which makes sense.

This is terrible, because people should see this movie, even though I’m convinced that if a thousand people saw this movie, 200 of ’em would love it and 500 would be repelled by it. Elaine May wasn’t everyone’s bag–she made four movies, three of which are brilliant, all of which have shitheaded, awful men as the protagonists. Though probably none as awful as Charles Grodin’s Lenny Cantrow.

The movie opens with the Jewish wedding of Lenny and Lila (Jeannie Berlin, who is Elaine May’s daughter). They drive in his tiny sports car to Florida for the honeymoon, and this is one of those things where we see in Lenny’s face his immediate regret over getting married. It is to Berlin’s considerable credit that she makes Lila utterly lovable–she’s a bit of a doofus, but her genuine love for Lenny and compassionate observations of people make her a character you care about, quite deeply.

During this honeymoon, Lenny is forever correcting Lila’s “mistakes” (she sings too much, doesn’t put on enough sunscreen, eats with her mouth open) and being miserable. On the first morning, impatient over Lila’s fussing with her hair, he rushes to the beach on his own, where he meets Cybil Shepherd’s Kelly Corcoran. Instantly, he falls in love with this blonde Venus, who is eagerly flirting with him. When he forces his way into her life, she accepts this, to the obvious chagrin of her father (Eddie Albert, who’s just great in his endless slow burn). He pushes, she seems to acquiesce, and then finally he makes the decision to divorce Lila and move to Minnesota to court Kelly.

Oh, man, Lenny brutally abandons Lila. This is in a seafood restaurant, and Berlin’s utter devastation is really hard to watch. This scene is amazing, but truly disturbing, as Lila is treated like garbage and all we want is to see her happy. On the other hand, Lenny leaving her is truly the best thing for her, but she’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life.

Lenny is a dedicated man, and, despite her father’s outright loathing (and physical threats) he follows Kelly to Minnesota. And here we see probably the greatest outsider’s rendering of this state in cinema history. I mean, damn, these people are blond, WASP-y assholes lumbering through the snow in their dumb parkas with little to say. They’re mayonnaise, they’re shallow, they seem bloodless. May’s take on the North Star State is more real, and truly vicious, than fifty hours of Fargo.

Well, Lenny eventually gets what he wants, but the victory is thoroughly Pyrrhic–The Heartbreak Kid is truly a story Jewish self-loathing and assimilation, its post-wedding finale wiping The Graduate’s sad ending off the map in terms of a glimpse at a despairing relationship. Lenny is doomed to live the life he sought, in suburban Minneapolis, a Jewish man from New York surrounded by Minnesota Nice. If that’s not Hell on Earth, I don’t know what is.

I honestly would have a hard time recommending this movie, though, because it isn’t the most pleasant evening out–this is a truly dark comedy, in the sense that you leave the film with dark thoughts. Many so-called “dark” comedies are nothing more than Disneyfied haunted houses (I’m looking at you, Tim Burton), or, like Heathers, a very good movie, still delicious fun–you don’t really feel disturbed. I don’t think anyone emerges from The Heartbreak Kid with anything but emotional fatigue, one dying laugh caught in the throat.

In 1972, the movie was a moderate success, with two Supporting Actor nominations for Jeannie Berlin’s Lila and Eddie Albert’s Mr. Corcoran, and I think it made money. It’s stunning to me that this is based on a script by Neil Simon–as a kid from the late 70s and 80s, the name Neil Simon meant the worst type of suburban adult fare, “thought-provoking”, “warm” and “funny” Broadway hits turned into shit, Oscar-winning movies (for actors) that no one watches anymore. It took Elaine May to draw out the subtle bitterness that might have been apparent in his early plays.

There were maybe eight other people in this secret screening, and they all loved it, and I like May and I like her movies (A New Leaf is my favorite, though). But unless you want to pay $20-$50 for a DVD on eBay, you’re not going to see it anytime soon. Which is sad.

One side-note: in the film, Kelly Corcoran’s family lives in an enormous white mansion overlooking Lake Minnetonka, a home that I’ve actually been in. Irwin Jacobs, the kind of scummy glad-handing millionaire who liquidates companies and rakes in the dough, whom Minnesotans weirdly admire (they admired Twins owner Carl Pohlad, too) lived there. I don’t know if he raised his family there, or just moved in after the kids were gone. Sadly, about four or five years ago he shot his wife and then himself–she was dying and in chronic pain. I went to the estate sale held maybe a year later, and it was the perfect example of the sadness of the very rich. Just awful taste in art and furniture and books–there was literally nothing there of interest, and the spaciousness didn’t radiate luxuriousness as much as it did ludicrous isolation. And when I mean “awful” taste in art, it wasn’t that I didn’t like it (I didn’t), it looked curated. As if the family did not have actual taste in art, wasn’t actually moved by anything except the money that could hire a designer to tell them how to feel about art.

In a sense, that’s the life that Lenny chose–the opening wedding was amongst a bunch of disheveled, loud, obnoxious, loving Jewish people and the closing wedding was amongst the bland, awful Gentiles who wring money from people’s lives and function in dead and empty mansions.

On a shelf in a sad bedroom of carpet and faux French furniture, a room that held the ghosts of a thousand sleepless nights, I saw a VHS tape of The Heartbreak Kid tucked away amongst a bunch of John Grisham novels. I wonder if they watched it, and what they thought of it if they did?