A good romantic comedy should be like champagne: light, bubbly and refreshing. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is more like molasses: slow, sappy and not worth the effort.
Audrey Hepburn stars as Holly Golightly, a young gold digging New Yorker. From the moment that a young writer named Paul moves into the apartment above her, we know that he will teach her that love is more important than money.
The cockamamie plot isn't worth delving into, but the problems of the movie are. Chief among them is the pacing; at times this film is ponderously slow, expending lots of time and effort on rather minor gags. Paul, played by George Stoppard, is badly lacking in charisma, and seems particularly dull next to the burning candle that is Audrey Hepburn. Finally, the movie hasn't quite made the transition from book--it's based on a Truman Capote novel--to screen. Monologues which might seem moving on the page feel forced when we seem them spoken. Some moments which could have been handled delicately in the book, such as a scene in which Golightly calls out for her brother in her sleep, seem ridiculous in the film.
"Breakfast at Tiffany's," which was made in 1961, interestingly straddles the divide between Old and New Hollywood. On the one hand, it takes a surprisingly frank attitude towards sex, barely bothering to conceal the out-of-wedlock liaisons of its characters. On the other, it features Mr. Yunioshi, a walking stereotype played by Mickey Rooney. Suffice to say that this squinty-eyed, buck-toothed Japanese character was not the Irish actor's finest hour.
The "Breakfast" filmmakers appear to have taken the attitude the Cleveland Cavaliers took with LeBron James: we have the perfect star, so we don't need anything else. Hepburn is charming, but the rest of the film is unfortunately a clunker.
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I agree with the odd pacing of the movie as well as Paul's one dimensional portrayal being boring. I guess he was an exaggerated foil to Audrey?
I remember first seeing Mickey Rooney's character and wanting to projectile vomit.
I think what drew me the most to the film (and as you expressed...served as its claim to fame) was Hepburn's character. Decked out in jewels and commitment issues, she's pretty iconic and groundbreaking for a woman in the 60s.
The only thing I truly hated about the movie (which has less to do with poor acting or "sappiness" and more with ideas about love that still haven't phased out and probably never will) was Paul's monologue at the end. It's raining and he's yapping about how "I love you so you belong to me!" and she's crying in the rain and chasing the stupid cat. Clearly this film isn't all that progressive; the heroine who's fiercely independent (albeit very troubled and bipolar) decides magically to "submit" to love in the end.
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