Aniston of the week: The Break-Up

Posted on by harrietwarman

This week, we take a look at Aniston’s post-Pitt break up movie, in which she stars with that loveable, fast-talking rogue, Vince Vaughn, as his exasperated partner.

FILM: The Break-Up456581_1281392499081_300_375
DIRECTOR: Peyton Reed
YEAR: 2006
CHARACTER NAME & PROFESSION: Brooke Meyers, Art Dealer
PLOT SUMMARY: Brooke and Gary (Vince Vaughn) are in a long-term relationship. They live together in a comfortable apartment in Chicago. One day, Brooke becomes tired of Gary’s selfishness and immaturity, when he fails to support and help her in the preparation of a family dinner. Having been through the same argument several times, she decides to break up with him, hoping he will change his ways to win her back. Instead, on getting some pretty poor advice from his best friend Johnny (Jon Favreau), who immediately suggests Brooke is sleeping with someone else, Gary starts playing games in order to drive he rout of the apartment. Brooke retaliates with her own childish behaviour. Eventually they get to the heart of why they fell out, but by that time, they’ve hurt each other too much to reconcile.

395e1912afde43d58bdd8fd7bc2479cd
A man who likes to play games, of course!

CHARACTER TRAITS: Generous, sharp, resourceful, patient, impetuous.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston is excellent here. Brooke begins by appearing as a typical over-achieving woman, presented in broad strokes – taking the burden of creating a lovely home and maintaining a great career – but then a highly nuanced performance emerges. When Brooke eventually reveals her heartache, Aniston conveys her pain acutely, showing her struggle to communicate her true feelings in the face of such an overbearing partner.

The Break-Up
Enter a caption

NOTES ON FILM: What’s brilliant about The Break Up is that the drama is weighted equally between the two leads, so that Brooke’s internal life and Gary’s poor decisions are portrayed with equal sensitivity and humour. This is also clearly to aid the audience to ‘pick a side’ as the marketing so blatantly suggested, and to an extent Brooke and Gary can be seen a characters simply conforming to male and female conditioning. He’s boorish and self-absorbed, obsessed with getting a pool table, she’s complimented for her home decorating skills by her mother etc. There’s also a pretty silly last act reveal from Favreau’s Johnny, who suddenly comes out with the insight about Gary that would have been pretty helpful to him at the start, but hey, that would ruin the fun, right?
Also worth noting this is the third film we’ve seen Jason Bateman and Aniston appear in together (he plays the couple’s realtor).
CONCLUSION: A seriously good Aniston film, mostly well written and beautifully performed.

Aniston of the week: The Switch

Posted on by harrietwarman

This is one of the few Aniston film’s this writer has watched more than once, probably due, not only to Jennifer’s charisma, but the presence of Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis in the cast. A silly plot, conventionally structured, but clearly it’s got through to me somehow. 00031357

FILM: The Switch
DIRECTOR: Josh Gordan, Will Speck
YEAR: 2010
CHARACTER NAME & PROFESSION: Kassie Larson, TV Producer
PLOT SUMMARY: Kassie and Wally (Jason Bateman, later seen with Aniston in Horrible Bosses) are best friends who once dated. Kassie wants to have a baby, and being single, decides to use a sperm donor. At her artificial insemination party, Wally gets very drunk and destroys the sperm sample. He switches it for his own ‘sample’ and forgets about it due to his ridiculous hangover. Kassie moves away from NYC to raise her son. Seven years later, she moves back to the city and reconnects with Wally. He notices that he and Kassie’s son Sebastien (Thomas Robinson) share are lot of the same anxieties and idiosyncrasies. Figuring out he must be the father, Wally decides to pursue Kassie, for whom he has always had feelings.

the_switch-1
Aniston with Bateman as Wally

CHARACTER TRAITS: Strong willed, nurturing, witty, and ambitious.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston is mainly required to be charming here, and she demonstrates a convincing motherly chemistry with Robinson, as well as a sort of endearing, exasperation with Bateman’s Wally.

jennifer-aniston-kassie-larson-and-jason
When your best friend behaves like an idiot, you’re all like…

NOTES ON FILM: I like to imagine (as I have before) how different this Aniston film would be, if it were told from her character’s perspective. Single mother has her pregnancy hijacked by her ‘best friend’ and struggles to reconcile her feelings for him, while dating the man she thought was her son’s father. What about her insecurities, her dilemma of what to do for her son? Instead it’s essentially all about sperm, and a man’s ‘right’ to his child. Well, you could read it that way, annoyingly it’s also very enjoyable in parts and has the kind of happy ending that only works because the performances – Aniston, Bateman and Robinson – are so convincing.
CONCLUSION: A hugely watchable Aniston outing.

Aniston of the week: Rumour Has It…

Posted on by harrietwarman

The year after Friends ended, Aniston made two films, one of which, Derailed we’ll cover in the coming weeks. The other is an odd identity crisis comedy/drama based on the idea of The Graduate being a true story related to Aniston’s character. Aniston pretty much carries the film, which, amongst the weirdness, almost saves it.

FILM: Rumour Has It…rumorhasit
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
YEAR: 2005
CHARACTER NAME AND PROFESSION: Sarah Huttinger, Obituary Columnist
PLOT SUMMARY: Recently engaged Sarah and Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) fly to Sarah’s sister’s wedding in Pasadena. Sarah feels like an outsider in her own family and doesn’t know why, she’s also unsure about marrying Jeff. When he figures out that Sarah must have been conceived before her parents wedding, she insists that her mother (who died years earlier) must have had an affair with someone before she got married. Sarah questions her Grandmother, Katharine (Shirley MacLaine) and discovers that her mother ran off to Mexico and had an affair with a man called Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) before the wedding, and that this story became the basis for the book/movie/play, The Graduate. Sarah sets off to find out if Beau is her biological father.

La Rumeur court
Shirley MacLaine as Katharine and Mark Ruffalo as Jeff

CHARACTER TRAITS: Withdrawn, introverted, insecure, caring, thoughtful.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston underplays for the most part here, portraying Sarah as someone really lost, but trying to keep it together. She handles Sarah’s arc very convincingly, and any awkward moments seem more down to the screenplay and direction than anything else. (See the moment she thinks she might have slept with her Dad – 1. Why include this scene? 2. Why play her reaction for laughs when it’s clearly a horrifying prospect?

OED-0556
Kevin Costner: practically sleeping through his role as Beau

NOTES ON FILM: This is an odd one. The film’s writer, Ted Griffin previously penned Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men, so clearly had some successes to his name, he’s also from Pasadena, which explains his interest in depicting the particular gossip mill of the area. Director Rob Reiner, is half responsible for When Harry Met Sally, one of the greatest comedies of all time, so the missteps in this film are curious. What’s good about it, is that it at least focuses on Sarah’s identity crisis, and leads towards her eventual closeness with her sister. What doesn’t work is the way this potentially thoughtful subject is explored – through perfunctory sexual encounters (with zero chemistry thanks to Costner) and ‘comedic’ incest issues. Sarah and Jeff do not seem like a good fit from the start, and the film doesn’t totally convince in concluding that Sarah just needs to appreciate what she’s got. One other note: Shirley MacLaine is excellent, as usual.
CONCLUSION: Aniston gets through it, and Ruffalo is charming, but this is just feels like Aniston testing out themes she’s explored better elsewhere (See Friends with Money, 2006).