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Vince Vaughn flexed his producing muscles for The Break-Up, a tale of love gone wrong in which he stars with Jennifer Aniston. Its "awkward" blend of goofy gags and half-baked relationship drama left critics cold, but speculation surrounding a real-life romance between the leading players guaranteed bums on seats.
Total Discord
Broad comedy and emotional drama grate against each other with even more discomforting effect in an alternative ending. Gary (Vaughn) and Brooke (Aniston) run into each other after the sale of their apartment and share a guarded moment of intimacy just before Brooke’s ‘flamboyant’ brother Richard (John Michael Higgins) bursts onto the scene in a camp cowboy outfit and starts singing about rainbows. Why? We just don’t know...
Three extended scenes are hardly worth mentioning except to say that they’re actually shorter than the versions that exist in the final cut. Meanwhile six deleted scenes are mostly taken up with Vaughn doing improvised rants as the broken-hearted Gary. Sadly, having a nervous breakdown while giving a guided tour of Chicago turns out to be only vaguely amusing. Thankfully, there is one good laugh as Gary tries to pick up a girl in a bar with an anecdote about "goblets".
John Michael Higgins performs his rendition of Gloria Gaynor classic I Will Survive in a section of outtakes (okay, he’s gay - we get it!) while Vaughn continues ranting at tourists. After offending one of the punters with a feeble knob joke, he explains, "Hey, some people laugh, some people don’t. I just throw them out there - it’s what I do for a living." Is this really an excuse, Vince?
Talking It Through
Vaughn attempts to explain his vision of the film in a commentary with Jennifer Aniston. Apparently he wanted to get away from the "watered down" Hollywood comedies we’re used to seeing and give this story a sense of "reality". This concept even extended to the visual rendering i.e. "When you have a look that’s more dramatic than most comedies, it’s easier to slip into the more dramatic stuff." Vaughn makes an interesting point, although perhaps leaving it to the set designer to paper over the cracks in the script wasn’t such a good idea?
While Vaughn was definitely wearing the trousers in this venture, Aniston had some creative input too. For instance, she came up with the opening scene at a baseball game where Gary and Brooke initially meet. On reading the original script, she explains, "It was tough to enter into the movie without really investing in the characters - seeing that they actually liked each other and why they liked each other." You see, it could have been worse.
Occasional hints about the shortcomings of the film, which are touched upon in the commentary and demonstrated in excised footage, probably explain why we don’t get more behind-the-scenes access. As it is, nothing on this DVD will help fans of Vaughn and Aniston to reconcile The Break-Up with their earlier, funnier work.
EXTRA FEATURES
