Movie Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's
1. Short review: --It made me sick.

2. Long review:
2.1. What I liked:
Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, and Patricia Neal are physically attractive actors. The sets are beautiful. Moon River.

2.2. What I did not like:

     How doest thou disgust me? Let me count the ways.
     Mickey Rooney's performance of I Y Yunioshi. MR played the buffoon to give us unneeded comic relief. There is nothing so serious in the movie that we need comic relief. This is not Macbeth. MR played Yunioshi as a buck-toothed, near-sighted Japanese. What? Were there no Japanese actors in Hollywood who would take the part? Perhaps I am imposing modern morals on a fifty-year old film, but I found MR's stereotypical portrayal of a Japanese character offensive.
     Buddy Ebsen's performance of Doc Golightly. Doc was portrayed as a country hick. He was a veterinarian, for Christ's sake. I am offended with the New York attitude that anyone from anywhere but New York is a hick.
     The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the characters. AH played Holly Golightly as an air-headed golddigger. (AH refused to portray a prostitute, so, in the film, Holly Golightly was written as what Truman Capote called 'an American geisha'. Nonsense.) Holly Golightly was paid $100 a week to visit a mafiaso in Sing Sing prison and bring back a 'weather report' to his lawyer. At a time when the working wage was $40 a week. And she could not figure out that this is a code? GP played Paul Varjack, a broke wannabe author who moonlights as a gigolo. Or a kept man.
     Their lives revolve around looking good, fashionable parties, fashionable people, and money. You could stand in the waters of this movie's intellectual depth and not get your ankles wet.
 
2.3. Who I think is the audience: New Yorkers in 1961.

2.4. Are the movies appropriate for children to see? No. No sex, no foul language, but behavior and lifestyles you would not want the kiddies to see.

2.5. On the basis of viewing this movie, will I pay to see the sequel? No, and thankfully there wasn't one.

2.6. Rating and the plot in a nutshell:

2.6.1. How I rate movies:
-- It made me sick.<-- Breakfast at Tiffany's
-- I want my money back.
-- Worth a rental, not more.
-- Worth first-run theater price once.
-- I will pay first-run theater price to see it again. 

Running time: 115 minutes.

2.6.2. The plot.

2.7. Other:

     The movie is 'loosely' based on the Truman Capote novella of the same name.

     Prayer.
     A year maybe three ago, I thought about the movie The Professional. Offered up a little prayer to see it again. Well, lo and behold, soon thereafter I found it on cable. Dubbed in French. Heh. Joke was on me. 

     I never saw Breakfast at Tiffany's, so I prayed to see it. This prayer I crafted more precisely. Lo and behold, this week I found the movie on cable. Very pretty people wearing very pretty clothes while they run through very pretty scenery. And all the while their souls are rotten.
     Yeah, I know George Axelrod wrote a feel-good, marshmallow ending for the movie that is nothing like Capote's ending.  His kissy-face ending did not save the story for me.
     The devil in a little black dress is still the devil.

     Look, sin is attractive. If it were ugly, we would not do it. Sin looks good, smells good, tastes good, feels good. But step by step, sin reduces your options until you have no choices left and you are a prisoner of sin. 

     Breakfast at Tiffany's is the New York City version of what happened to Eliza Doolittle after My Fair Lady. (Even the trailer nauseates me. How can anyone think these characters are attractive?)

     Now I pray to see Shenandoah. Perhaps this time I shall get it right.

     YMMV.

2.8. Links:
IMDb review, Rotten Tomatoes review