"She's a Reeeeeeeal Phony..." - Blake Edwards's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Directed by: Blake Edwards

Rating: ★★★★ (Very Good)

written by: George Axelrod; based off of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote.

Starring: Audrey Hepburn (Holly Golightly), George Peppard (Paul Varjak), Patricia Neal (Mrs. Emily Failenson), Martin Balsam (O.J. Berman), Buddy Ebsen (Doc Golightly), and Mickey Rooney (Mr. Yunioshi).  

Plot run-down: A beastly great rom-com about a young New York socialite (Audrey Hepburn) who becomes interested in a young man (George Peppard) who has moved into her apartment building.

First, a disclaimer: up until today, I have never been a tremendous fan of Breakfast At Tiffany's. I remember hazily seeing it once when I was a freshman in high school at the behest of one of my good friends, Taylor. I had a huge crush on her at the time and I remember being able to gush with her over various vintage-y, retrotastic culture-points that nobody else in our school wanted to. (We shared a love-love relationship with the Beatles; but then again, who doesn't?) If there was one thing I couldn't understand, however,  it was her certifiable obsession with the actress Audrey Hepburn. Back then, I didn't think much of good ol' Audrey. I thought she was pretty (and ten, twenty, thirty times the actress her early-60s contemporary Natalie Wood[en] was), but she was no Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield or even Lauren Bacall. (I still believe that!)

Those eyes....they say one glance of her eyes is enough to set mortal men to stone. ('Cept Bogie, of course.)

Through my friendship with Taylor, one name kept popping up over and over again: Holly Golightly. "What a queer name," I thought. "Golightly? Sounds like the name of one of the girls in a PG-13 James Bond flick." She talked about Holly incessantly. She knew the screenplay to the tee. She told me of days when she was experiencing the "mean reds." The mean what, I questioned. [Cue perfectly-delivered Hepburnesque monologue about the "mean reds" being "the feeling you get when you're afraid of something but you don't know what it is you're afraid of" and how they're distinct from the "mean blues."] There was something fabulous about Taylor; how big she dreamed, how wide-eyed she got when she talked to me. Sometimes I could hear the voice of Holly Golightly run right through her...and I hadn't even seen the movie yet.

Still, whatever Taylor recommended, I pursued with all my heart's content. I promised her I'd watch it licketysplit and see what I thought. (This was back in the day when I thought the AFI 100 Best Movies list was worth a damn. I saw it was in the top 20 and my heart jumped with joy. Huzzah, it'll be a great film, and I can gushgushgush about it with Tay-lor....) I Googled the name "Holly Golightly" and Breakfast at Tiffany's immediately come up. It was a movie that had Patricia Neal (a name I was sorta familiar with), Mickey Rooney (hey! the guy from Night at the Museum!), and was directed by Blake Edwards (who?). In any case, I checked it out immediately from my local library in Phoenix and popped it into the DVD player the first chance I got.

I remember watching it and....jeez, this movie is really long. And quite racist. And this girl isn't funny in the slightest. In fact, she isn't kooky in the good Diane Keaton way! She's just....rich.

When it finished, I didn't feel like it spoke to me in any capacity. It was just an empty movie that just so happened to have Audrey Hepburn in it. I didn't speak of it to Taylor the next day; I just said, "I see what you mean when you say you're Holly Golightly." (Of course, being the semi-cultured youngster that I was, I didn't have an inkling of an idea of how the hell Taylor was like Audrey Hepburn. I didn't even see Holly Golightly, I simply saw the lady who played the Cockney flower-girl in My Fair Lady.)

Fabulous.

Flash-forward to May 10th, 2015. I'm sitting at CoHo (Coffee House; Cardinals love their initials) in sunny Northern California, trying to juggle writing a short-story for class, writing a French composition about a tradition my family does (plot twist: there aren't a great deal of them besides the obligatory Christmas celebration), and reading another short story about a murderer who can't tell the difference between a slaughtered sheep and his young female victims (seriously; it's called "Sheep" by Thomas McNeely, check it out sometime). I finish the composition and suddenly realize I don't have anything pressing due until much later in the week...so fuck it, I treat myself to a movie. I comb through Netflix and, lo and behold, Breakfast at Tiffany's comes up. Now I haven't seen it in a very long time, but I'm keener to return to it because of the director this time, not the star. I've been revisiting some of Blake Edwards's material for the past month or so, and am slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that he is one of the most underrated American comedic directors of his time. Everybody knows him from his legendary work with Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies (A Shot in the Dark [1964] and The Pink Panther Strikes Again [1976] will have your sides bursting with laughter), but almost nobody talks about him beyond that. Well, I revisited his 1965 comedy road epic The Great Race (starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood) and found it mind-numbingly hilarious. It is inspired lunacy of the greatest kind, featuring menage-a-quatres & randy polar bears & mad suffragettes & an around-the-world-in-40-days race from New York to Paris. It's all made magical by the direction of Blake Edwards, whose influences range from Charlie Chaplin to Jacques Tati and everyone in between. (In a later review, I'll go in detail over the positives and negatives of an interesting, if somewhat bloated, film like The Great Race.) 

Jack Lemmon in Blake Edwards's "The Great Race" (1965)

WARNING: Don't try this at home, kids.

Naturally, I'm in the process of exploring Edwards, and it's with that background that (with the encouragement of my friend Laura, who digs these classics as well) I decided to revisit the "hellish plasticities" of Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

And you know what happened? The more I thought about it, the more I realized how wrong I was about Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's a goshdanged humdinger of a rom-com with a sardonic edge.

The biggest mystery of the movie is how Audrey Hepburn has such perfect goddamn morning hair all the time!

In three words: sumptuous, cosmopolitan, and complicated.

If we think about it, there isn't very much plot to the movie. It essentially revolves around the efforts of a young, Salingeresque writer named Paul (played by George Peppard) to convince Hepburn's Holly Golightly that love is not found in dollar bills or in social markers of success. Love, in fact, is right in front of her. Probably the most pressing thing that occurs in the film is a bungled arrest of Holly, who has unknowingly been relaying secret codes on the behalf of a gangster who's behind bars in Sing Sing. But even this big moment of narrative tension is relieved at the first instance by Blake Edwards. We are more focused with how the arrest affects Holly and Paul's relationship than with the implication that oh shit, she can go to jail for aiding a known criminal. Hell, it's very evident that Holly doesn't particularly care about any societal ramifications: she's willing to jump bail and risk going back to prison in order to go on holiday in Brazil. Why? 'Cause she feels like it. 

Truman Capote famously railed against the movie for two reasons: one, he didn't think Audrey Hepburn was particularly capable of bringing the character of Holly Golightly to life. He thought only Marilyn Monroe could bring the part to fruition. (Unfortunately for Truman, and perhaps fortunately for us, Marilyn was too busy filming John Huston's The Misfits at the time to take on a big role such as Holly Golightly, so the producers contacted the next best thing: Miss Hepburn.) 

Dammit world, this is what we could have had!

Two, he felt that the finished product was "saccharine", that it was corrupted by the sickly sweet platitudes of Hollywood conventional romances, and that his story of Holly the tsk-tsk-tsk-gal-lost-in-the-maze-of-the-city becomes one of a free-spirited ingenue who drifts from town to town. These are natural complaints for a writer as talented and as committed to the worlds he draws as Mr. Capote, but he forgot one key ingredient: this is the movies. They function on their own specific logic, and if there's anything that I've learned by watching movies for the brief amount of time I have, it's that you mustn't judge what you see in front of you on a first kneejerk reaction. Often, you have to ask yourself what the circumstances, chain-of-events, and stepping-stones that led to the ending you see before you. Often, people ONLY remember the ending and don't try to connect it with the film that they've seen unfold. And it becomes incredibly easy for a Hollywood picture, especially, to be taken apart because the endings are often so saccharinely banal. But think of it this way: the real magic of the film occurs before the ending. The actual ending can be changed and distorted at the whim of a merciless producer or an idiotic screenwriter. But the middle of the movie? Why, that's the director's baby. And, boy, does Blake Edwards have great ideas for who and what Holly Golightly represents.

"Blake, darling, be a dear and get me my cigarette-holder, will you? I haven't had nicotine in my body in five bloody hours and I need it now."

Contrary to popular perception, Holly Golightly is not the member of the nouveau riche that her elegant little black Chanel dress and Roosevelt-style cigarette holder indicate on the movie poster. I was frankly shocked that Audrey Hepburn--whose Holly Golightly is an iconic symbol of elegance and stateliness and haute couture in fashionista and bourgeoista social-circles everywhere today, whose rich air graces the canvases of many a $20 college-dorm-room poster--is actually a wanna-be socialite, a working-class girl who's had to work hard to get rid of that Midwestern hick accent of hers. She is fractured, wanted only for her body, unwanted for her soul. She doesn't fall into any neat category. She doesn't know what she wants to be; she's just sort of drifting along, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The people around her judge her harshly; a movie exec (Martin Balsam) pegs her as a "real phony...a GREAT kid, but a phony." A suave Brazillian aristocrat in line to be the next President of the Sugar-Cane Country says she's "dangerous for any man's image." And our secondary protagonist? The guy we're supposed to root for. He says that she's "a coward" and that "she's got no guts." 

All three of these guys, however, are wrong. The truth of the matter is that they've never met anybody like Holly Golightly before. She's tres moderne: we see she's strongly determined to escape her past and forge a new city identity for herself. That must be hell for anybody who comes from the country and who's been told she's beneath everybody. Before she was Holly, she was Luella Mae: a generic hick-girl who was expected to fritter her life away in the farms, raising chickens, breeding cows, and birthing children she was out of her element to birth. Director Blake Edwards doesn't show us the steps that she took to become Holly Golightly (that's another movie in and of itself), but from what we learn from her husband Doc, we can surmise that the person she is today is a significantly-different, hardly-fought, furiously-updated version of Luella Mae. It's cliched to say this, but she's definitely a new woman. That the men in the picture can't understand Holly doesn't speak to any chauvinism or genuine bemusement on the part of Blake Edwards. It just speak to his ability to (very obliquely and very intelligently) say how America's men will always be playing a game of perpetual catch-up to strong and enrapturing women like Holly Golightly. 

Sure, she loves Paul the writer, but he's not made of particularly strong stuff; he's a writer, an artist whose chances of immediate success are few and far-between. Holly Golightly  isn't a player so much as a survivor; she knows what poverty is, and she doesn't want to fall into that state of disrepair again. There comes a time in everybody's lives where we come to a curious crossroads--whether that be the first year of college, the night of one's marriage, or the dissolution of a conjugal relationship--and we feel dissatisfied with the persona that we drag along with us. We slowly but surely want to reinvent ourselves; we want to be a better person than what we were in the past. The problem is we're too afraid to let those old personalities go, their memories still linger on in our souls. This is exactly the type of existential crisis Holly faces throughout the movie, as various people come back from her past (her husband) and her present (Paul) to tell her what she can and cannot be.

But she doesn't have to listen to any of them.

She constantly forges her own destiny. She learns through the faults and mistakes of others. That the ending of Breakfast at Tiffany's acquiesces to the logic of the rom-com isn't a cop-out or a disintegration of Audrey Hepburn's profoundly-drawn character Holly. Rather, it bolsters Holly; she decides, like she's done throughout her whole life, to defy people's expectations and become somebod. In the film's ending, she's no longer the lonely, "phony" drifter Holly Golightly. She tries a new experiment: fidelity with one guy. She's clearly in love with Paul, and they make a swell team, and her search for an identity finally leads her to a (momentary) period in her life where she will be a taken woman. It's not an outright moment of feminism, but it's not a moment of total misogyny and female subversion as is typical of other lesser Hollywood movies of this time. All throughout her life, Holly's been a drifter, unaware of where she should go or who she is. She goes against the grain of what people say to her. She's had money dictate the paths her life takes. But in Edwards's beautiful ending--complete with obligatory rainstorms, melodrama, and reunions with "anominous" cats--Holly proves she's got what it takes to once again DEFY WHAT ANYONE THINKS OF HER and go into a new stage of her life, feet first. How that stage will work out for her, we can only guess. Blake Edwards, Audrey Hepburn, and George Axelrod (the screenwriter) don't have the answers. 

But here's the real question: WHAT HAPPENS TO CAT?!? I must know, Blake Edwards, I must know!!!

But we can accept Holly as a character more than the sum of her parts. I was admittedly tempted to chide the movie for a pretty empty and cliched ending. But the more I think about it, the more I think of how well the nuances of Holly Golightly converge into one fine point at film's end. The character gloriously pays off, and it rewards Edwards's meandering, patient, and cosmopolitan direction. Is there any greater proof of this finely crafted line between elegance and emptiness than in the famous guitar performance of "Moon River" by Audrey? Watch it twice. Notice Edwards's clever demolishing of the artist's hang-up to capture everything he sees around him in a permanent form. (The camera lingers on a typed, diet-Salinger sentence in Paul's typewriter about the author meeting "the girl with the nameless cat".) Notice how he immediately compliments this observation with a beautiful human moment of imperfection: Audrey is in cleaning-clothes, dirty jeans, and at one point, her voice cracks as she lamely strums simple chords on her guitar. She doesn't sing "Moon River"; she croaks it, she pleas with nobody in particular. Can words fully capture something as delicate and as powerful as this? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can movies? Perhaps...

Little known fact: those are actually Eric Clapton's hands playing the guitar.

Sorry, Taylor, that it took me 5 years to recognize the genius of Breakfast at Tiffany's that you already knew in its rawest, purest form.

(One star off, of course, for the idiotic and repulsive Asian stereotype that Mickey "Yunioshi" Rooney half-asses. The yellowface is unconvincing, but I tried not to harshly judge the movie based on this. Yes, it's unnecessary and unfunny, but Blake Edwards was genuinely remorseful later in his life for including the character in the first place, saying he would gladly cut his own movie today if only to excise that unfortunate character. And, mercifully, it's only a tangential aspect of the otherwise rich film.)

Ah, 1961. When being politically correct amounted to dressing up Mickey Rooney in inept buck teeth.