kid.jpg.…being the new feature on Cinematical where we watch a film that is about to be remade and make wild, speculative guesses as to how that endeavor might turn out.

Remember the end of The Graduate? Benjamin’s chased Elaine all over California, he’s broken up her wedding, he’s escaped with her and now they’re sitting on a bus, and he’s got this expression on his face that is unmistakeable: “Now what?”  He’s torn down his entire life to win this girl, and now that he has her, what's there left for him to do?

That constant, nagging fear of stagnation - we can call it "Now What?” Syndrome - motivates and permeates Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, to be soon remade by director James Bobin, with Jason Bateman in the starring role. The Heartbreak Kid picks up thematically where The Graduate left off; Lenny Kantrow (Charles Grodin) could be thought of as Benjamin Braddock six or seven years on. Things didn't work out with Elaine; he's grasping for new straws in the wrong places. Simultaneously jaded and naive, he's getting too old to blame his fuckups on youth. He's desperately trying to out-run complacency through a series of near-miss hurdle jumps and foolish self-dares.

 

It's classic compulsive behavior, but it plays out in a highly dated narrative context, one that’s mechanically dependent  on a bad girl/good girl, feminist/pre-feminist dichotomy specific to the early 1970s. The whole mess is set into motion when Lenny starts dating Lila, a Nice Jewish Girl who refuses to sleep with him. “Nobody waits anymore!” he complains, in between stamping the girl with perfunctory kisses.

Nobody waits - but Lila does. And so, marriage ensues. Then Cybill Shepherd shows up - and suddenly Lenny has a new goal, around which to pursue new lows of self-destruction.

The question becomes: how do you remake a film so dependent on the sexual mores of its moment? In 1973, it was much easier to make a case for there being two types of girls in the world. Old-fashioned, marriage-minded Lila has a worldview limited to suburban domesticity - she wants nothing more than for Lenny to be as ecstatic as she is about the idea of "'til death do us part". Then there's Shepherd's Kelly, a college student (read: budding feminist) who flagrantly pursues the married Lenny but has to be convinced that sex is anything more serious than a game. In the end, neither woman is enough for Lenny, and the fact that they represent such disperate poles of fluxing gender roles would seem to have something to do with that.

How do we re-write this story for a time in which, though abstinence has become more politicized than ever, the shotgun wedding is virtually a thing of the past? My guess is that Bobin's version will tone down Lenny's desperation, that in the hands of Jason Bateman, this totally irredeemable character will become a palpably nicer person. Steered by Grodin, Lenny's jump into marriage is a blatantly, absurdly bad idea; it is, in and of itself, a working satire of how far a man will go to get laid. Could a contemporary film get away with such assholery on the part of its protagonist? And, unless the new Lila character (slated to be played by Amy Poehler) is a total caricature, would there be any way to believably transpose this situation faithfully? I imagine that, in the new version, Bateman will have to be actually, like, in love with his bride, which could conceivably make it all the more melodramatic when that relationship falls apart.

The end also poses a problem. SPOILER ALERT: the original Heartbreak Kid ends at Kelly and Lenny's wedding party, with Lenny staring off into space with that "Now What?" look on his face. This was a film framed as being essentially about a man in incurable existential crisis. But that was the 70s; incurable existential crisis doesn't exactly move popcorn thirty years on. I can't imagine Bobin having any choice but to happy-ending his way out of this one.