This essay is part of Avidly’s Rom Com Superlatives series
It’s midway through Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and newlywed couple Lenny and Lila are enjoying a seafood dinner in Miami Beach. At least, Lila is enjoying it, cracking lobster claws and laughing. Lenny is nervy and on edge, alternately hectoring the waiter and hovering over his wife (“Is it terrific? Did I exaggerate? Was it worth waiting for?”). The audience knows Lila’s been brought here for one reason: To get dumped. In the long history of rom-com break-ups, what makes this one especially brutal is its duration—that we are witnessing the destruction of a woman’s romantic fantasies in real time.
May adapted The Heartbreak Kid, her second film, from a script by Neil Simon, one of the many he wrote for Hollywood in the 1970s, most of them jokey romantic comedies of errors. At its start the film hews more or less—mostly less—to rom-com convention. Lenny and Lila, two young Jewish twenty-somethings from New York, played by Charles Grodin and May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin, respectively, meet cute at a bar. A whirlwind montage telegraphs their extremely rushed affair. They barely have time to grab a pizza and do some light grocery shopping before they’re marching down the aisle and dancing to Hava Nagila. By minute five of the movie, they’re en route to a fateful honeymoon in Miami, where Lenny—one of cinema’s all-time schmucks—falls under the thrall of the sporty blonde who flirts with him on the beach. She teases Lenny that he’s sunbathing in her “spot,” their dopey banter making the encounter feel more like a meet-dumb. When a bad sunburn sidelines Lila, viewers follow the love-struck Lenny as he courts his shiksa paramour, Kelly (Cybil Shepherd). Lenny concocts increasingly outlandish alibis for Lila, who’s confined to their hotel room and slathered in cream so she won’t “puff up.” He finally placates his new bride by promising, after days of neglect, that he’ll take her out for Florida lobster and a slice of “yummy, yummy pecan pie.”
They’ve just finished the main course when Lenny begins, in the most circuitous way possible, to break off his less-than-week-long marriage. He starts with some existential musings, Lambert Strether-style invocations “to live!…I mean, we only pass through once, we can’t squander it!” Lila, however, misses the point. “You’re so deep, Lenny,” she says, reverently. “I never knew you were so deep.” He tries again: “We have to prepare ourselves…Everything could be terrific! The world could be singing! And then suddenly, for no reason at all, it’s over…it’s over, Lila.” Lila sits, stunned. “Oh Lenny, you’re dying!” she sobs, collapsing in his arms. “I’m not dying, who said anything about dying!” he retorts, offended enough to finally get to the point. “I want out of the marriage! I want out of the goddamn marriage!”
Cringe doesn’t really begin to describe what happens next. May first cuts to reaction shots from surrounding patrons—all looking how we feel—and then back to the couple. As Lila gasps and dry heaves, begging for “a quarter to go to the lady’s room, Lenny refuses to acknowledge her distress, resorting instead to increasingly frantic and falsely jovial schtick. We watch as May’s darkly comic set-up keels toward something sadder and more unsettling. “I’m going to throw up,” Lila keeps repeating, and there is something nauseating for the audience, too, about being forced to witness Lenny’s manic ministrations: he physically presses Lila to take sips of water, and attempts to comfort her with a deranged sincerity that—it must be said—is also very funny. “I’m going to give you all the luggage. I’m going to give you…all the wedding presents!” he announces. It’s a scene that leaves us at an affective crossroads: Are we meant to laugh? Cry? Both?
It’s certainly “Awkward!,” as one YouTube uploader promises. But it’s also more than that. Breakups happen all the time on-screen; fancy meals often set the stage for romantic disasters. But they’re not supposed to happen like this; they’re not supposed to feel this pitiless. When Julia Roberts suffers through her painful lobster dinner in Mystic Pizza (1988)—or her painful lobster lunch in My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)—we know the discomfort will abate: Daisy’s moment will come, and Jules will find solace even if she doesn’t get her man. Even the shellfish-adjacent faux-pas in Pretty Woman—when Vivian shoots an escargot across the dining room—is just a prelude to love.
But there are no rewards or recompense awaiting Lila. Over eleven excruciating minutes, May strips away the mystifying illusions that have powered Hollywood’s portrayal of romance, making The Heartbreak Kid less a straight rom-com than a poisonous little genre chaser. By the time it’s over, the farce generated by the film’s screwball set-up—man falls for new woman on his honeymoon!—has dissipated, leaving audiences to confront the casual cruelty that, in May’s world, is pretty much always a constitutive element of The Couple. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has written, all four of May’s feature films “deal with the same obsessive theme—the secret betrayal of one member of a couple by the other.” (May’s debut film, A New Leaf (1971), also involves a husband’s attempt to get rid of his wife.) While May was hardly alone among 1970s cineastes in tinkering with the genre’s conventions—the decade witnessed a wave of what have variously been termed “nervous romances,” “anti-romances,” and “radical romantic comedies”—what differentiates her films is their strong suggestion that just because we’ve been taught to pursue coupledom doesn’t necessarily mean that we should..
The scene’s power is not only a testament to May’s alchemical transformation of Simon’s heavy-handed screenplay, to which she was technically required to adhere, and the recovery of emotional realism from his rat-a-tat dialogue and one-liners, most at Lila’s expense. It is also the product of these two performers. Grodin’s commitment to doubling downmakes him a clear forerunner of so much contemporary comedy—see: Tim Robinson’s exertions on I Think You Should Leave. But for me the real magic comes from Berlin’s Lila. Written in the original script as an insufferable dope, Berlin was insistent that Lila be something more: “You see, I didn’t want to make that girl stupid. It would have been so easy to do Lila stupid. I don’t think Lila was stupid. I think every single thing she did was justified to her.”
Romance may be an illusion, in other words, but that doesn’t make Lila’s feelings about it any less real. If Simon had contempt for Lila, May offers a more clear-eyed take: she understands the character as a product of her limited experience and circumstances. In this regard, Lila is actually like most of the characters—male and female—that populate May’s films and plays, and who are generally unable to recognize, let alone escape, their social conditioning.
At a moment when the women’s movement was looking to Hollywood’s few female directors for uplift, Lila’s abjection didn’t exactly endear the film to contemporary feminist critics. Tear-streaked, keening, almost catatonic, May’s heroine doesn’t present a particularly “positive” image. But it may be for that very reason, fifty years after the film’s release, that the closing shots of Lila’s face strike me so forcefully. Like many female viewers in 2023, I know what it’s like to have your feelings dismissed by a man who claims to know better—to be told literally, or in so many words, to just chill. Gaslit and mislead, gainsaid and betrayed, Lila is not only mistreated but forced to suffer the addedindignity of being falsely consoled. In the end, maybe this is why Lila’s break up is the worst ever: because she’s getting dumped and duped. May, then, isn’t just showing us this woman’s pain. She is also showing us, under the cover of light comedy, the deeply pathological male behaviors that produce it.
Elizabeth Alsop is a professor, writer, and editor; her book on the films of Elaine May will be out in 2024. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and online @elizabethalsop and @elizabethalsop.bsky.social