Breakfast at Tiffany's: An Examination of a Beneficiary of Nostalgia

Breakfast at Tiffany's: An Examination of a Beneficiary of Nostalgia
by Dileep Rao

Breakfast at Tiffany's, the Blake Edwards so-called classic romantic
comedy is actually a pretty poor film, all around. I saw it again, for probably the third time in my life and the first time in about ten years.

What is overwhelming about this film is how pathetically out of touch its makers were with the human condition. First and foremost is the atrocity of a performance by Mickey Rooney as the Japanese landlord, Mr.Yonioshi. It has been well discussed, but it is amazing how much this cringe-inducing racist epithet of a performance ruins the film. He is unfunny, deeply misguided and miscast. His buck tooth stereotype of a 'Chinese' character is at odds with his Japanese name, though I doubt Mr. Rooney has the talent to correctly affect even an Irish accent then or now.

While the civil rights movement had yet to take hold in the United States, it seems inane that twenty-five years after Hattie McDaniel won the Oscar in Gone with the Wind, Mr. Edwards couldn't find a suitable actor to play the landlord.

Audrey Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a fatuous and faintly odious creature surfing the currents that her looks will allow. Her treatment of Mr. Yonioshi too reeks of the racial dismissiveness that was a lazy choice in her character and the script. But this film is doomed not just by its racism.

Hepburn's accent is joke, and though the script tries to justify it, it simply wears thin. She herself is beautiful, luminous and glowing. But her character is very flimsily portrayed, her interest in various moneyed suitors so flip and glib that it's hard not to take her for shallow. And if she's shallow, we must then think George Peppard as Paul Varjak to be equally shallow: a kept writer who chases a beautiful but pointless girl. Peppard is okay, affable, handsome, sometimes inventive (the party scenes are raucous and jarring as we see middle aged people getting drunk and acting like twentysomethings do today) as he negotiates the silly and murky plot. The chemistry between him and Hepburn is not entirely false, though when Hepburn is dared to be aggressive (she gets into bed with him which is a bold and exciting touch from a film in 1961) she doesn't have the mettle to pull this off completely. The other Hepburn in her prime would have lit the screen up with her smoldering physical vivacity.

The idea, formed in the novel by Truman Capote, of a call girl trying to sweeten how her life appears is undermined by the fact that Edwards as a director and Hepburn as Golightly are themselves unable to stomach it. None of her suitors make the case totally credible. None of the real humiliation of this profession touches Hepburn, which is a shame because even a moment of its truth would have deepened her performance. Even Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman could add a hint of that. And if this life is about different kinds of prostitution (Peppard's vs. Hepburn's), that fact is skated around without so much as a glance between them, or recognition on either part of how parallel their secrets run.

The best performances in the film are by Buddy Ebsen as Golightly's long lost husband and by John McGiver as a sentimental salesman in Tiffany's itself. Most of the rest of the cast seem poorly directed although as they function in Edward's gags, they are funny and affecting. He seems to either desperately need Peter Sellers to show up or just a better script. Hepburn isn't up to the challenge of being as sexual (even in an understated way which the era required) as this story would require. This film was supposed to be directed by John Frankenheimer which likely would have made the film far better as he was a more talented visualist and more seasoned with the camera than Edwards at this time.

This film in its entirety is a trifle, sometimes memorable or chuckle- inducing but for the most part ill adapted and poorly performed. Worse, it is spineless in its depiction of human life, the idea of Holly Golightly's existence or Varjak's gigalo orbit or, indeed, the performance of Mickey Rooney. It is flimsy, cheap and entirely expired.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.