The Heartbreak Kid (1972)

2025-391 / Zedd MAP: 82.33 / MLZ MAP: 86.32 / Score Gap: 3.99

Wikipedia / IMDb / Official Trailer / Our Collection

It’s at times like these that my mind wanders back to the early 1990s, when I ran a large fish room for a local pet store chain. Hundreds of tanks in neat, humming rows - each one bubbling, lit from above, casting caustic refractions across the floor like silent Morse code. The higher-ups had decided against individual tank heaters and instead kept the whole room at a steady, swampy 82 degrees. The heat clung to your clothes. The air pressed itself into your lungs. I remember the way my breath would shorten as customers, filed in - curious, needy, breathing back their thousand breaths into the same thick fetid air.

On lunch breaks, I’d flee to my car. A [1980 VW Rabbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Golf?wprov=sfti1#First_generation_(Mk1/A1,_Typ_17;_1974) - tiny on the outside, but compared to that compressed fish room, the interior felt like a cathedral. I’d roll the windows down and just be, letting the silence stretch out into something close to normal. That’s where my head went watching The Heartbreak Kid (1972) - not to Grodin directly, not even to Lila or Kelly, but to that humid sense of airlessness. The kind that doesn’t kill you but makes you hyper-aware of each breath. Elaine May doesn’t direct this movie so much as close the walls in around it. The whole thing feels like it’s taking place inside a fish tank: lit, magnified, and impossible to escape.

Charles Grodin plays Lenny as a man allergic to consequence, but still mortally afraid of being disliked. He smiles his way through dread, lies with a kind of panicked charisma, and tries to crawl out of his skin using charm as a crowbar. May lets him hang - long shots, tight frames, zero oxygen. Every scene is socially over-lit and spiritually under-ventilated. It’s not farce. It’s not satire. It’s a slow and surgical suffocation. The comedy is excruciating because it never offers relief. Grodin doesn’t descend so much as marinate.

And Elaine May - well, I have her filed away - somewhere in a mental Rolodex: Ishtar (1987)… ouch. That one’s radioactive in the cultural memory, a film so tainted by backlash that watching it feels like stepping into a courtroom where the verdict was delivered decades ago. I offer up this simple truth: I’ve never seen it. Not out of spite, not even fear - but because I don’t believe I could approach it fairly. In my scoring system (MAP), I try to start every film at 50 - neutral ground - and let it float to wherever it’s going. But Ishtar? It’s been kept underwater too long. I don’t think it could float at all.

Some films get mythologized before they ever get a chance to be movies. And when that happens, perception becomes gravity. It doesn’t matter what the film is, only what the culture says it is. I don’t want to wrestle a film that never asked to be iconic for the wrong reasons. In that way, my not watching Ishtar is a small act of empathy. A way of letting it be still. A mercy watch, declined out of respect.

But The Heartbreak Kid? That’s a film that begs to be endured. You don’t laugh so much as sweat. It reminds me that the most dangerous kind of panic is the kind that comes with a smile and good intentions - and the tight framing to prove it.

Movie on.