"Ayi em nyekid!"
Longtime Simpsons writer and executive producer
David Mirkin's predilection for wickedly witty
cartoonishness is only slightly tempered in his
live-action movies. Both Romy and Michele's High
School Reunion and now, Heartbreakers, feature
outrageously outfitted female protagonists who connive
and pratfall their way through ridiculous romantic
comedy plots, only to come to a realization that
traditional values -- say, happy heterosexual
coupledom -- are the key to fitting in with the rest
of the world.
In Heartbreakers, the cost of fitting in is
initially too much for both Max Conners (Sigourney
Weaver) and her daughter Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt).
Expert, longtime con artists, their basic scam is
premised on the fact that Max refuses to conform to
any expectations of good wifedom or patient
femininity. She's a go-getter and she's also been
angry for years, ever since her one true love left her
pregnant and alone. Now all men are not to be trusted
and deserve to suffer the vengeance she will wreak
upon them (this is a story that she repeats often,
much to Page's visible dismay, she being the result of
that pregnancy). In order to get where she wants, Max
has perfected the art of looking like she fits in to
whatever crowd she's manipulating. This typically
means she pretends to subscribe to conventional
notions of commitment and family harmony.
Over the years, Max has trained Page to work with her,
and now that the girl is filled out with all kinds of
"dangerous curves" (as the film's promotional poster
terms them), she has become a most valuable asset. The
usual scam runs something like this: Max marries a
wealthy mark (preferably one whose money isn't
entirely legal, so he's easily manipulated), and on
the morning after a frustrating non-consummated
wedding night, Page seduces the mark into a
compromising position, so that, in the final step, the
mark sheepishly coughs up a healthy divorce settlement
as Max sits stoically at the lawyers' table,
sunglasses on and handkerchief at the ready.
Just as they complete a scam of this sort involving
chop-shop-owner Dean (Ray Liotta), Page decides that
she's had enough. At 21, she feels ready to go out on
her own. Upset at the impending loss of her partner
and child, Max convinces her that they must make one
more big score, and they head down to Palm Beach where
the rich fish gather. There they decide to take an
aging, chain-smoking tobacco tycoon, William Tensy
(Gene Hackman), with terrible breath and worse teeth.
Though Max is put off by such stomach-turning
yuckiness, she comes up with yet another new persona,
the Russian Ulga, who wears spectacular furs and
speaks with a riotously bad accent: see especially,
Ulga's attempts to refuse Tensy access to her hotel
room because, she wails, "Ayi em nyekid!" or to dazzle
him with a bizarre, balalaika-accompanied rendition of
"Back in the USSR" (which, in her pronunication,
becomes "beck en de USSR").
Meanwhile, Page is falling in love with someone, the
incredibly laid-back, incredibly generous Jack (Jason
Lee) who happens to be a millionaire himself. Of
course, falling in love with a potential mark is
exactly the wrong thing to do in her line of work, and
so, conflicts arise, as mom attempts to set her
straight, while ensuring that her own con with Tensy
is on track (in this, Max must outsmart Tensy's
fiercely protective maid, crisply played by Nora
Dunn). Max and Page's friction entails some
potentially touching mother-daughter moments, which
the film is mostly smart enough to twist up as comedy.
Heartbreakers has a rudimentary feminist
sensibility, in that the girls are strong and
self-confident, and engage in the kind of broad,
crazed, physical comedy that's not often granted to
girls. It's not so grating as Romy and Michele, but
is goony and pleasurable, and often very funny. As
gifted as Hackman is, the Tensy scenes tend to be
repetitive (hacking and wretching, hacking and
wretching), but when Weaver is on screen -- with
Hackman, Hewitt, or Liotta -- the film soars. Once
again, she reveals that her sense of self and her
sense of comedy are equally sublime.
