"Heartbreakers"

A sexpot farce starring Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt hits just the right note between naughty and raunchy.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 23, 2001 | When blushing bride Sigourney Weaver informs brand-new, hot-to-trot hubby Ray Liotta that he's got a little bit of frosting on his face -- "right there" -- and then leans in to lick it off, you can understand why the poor sap's first impulse is to break the two-minute mile getting her to the honeymoon suite. She's a tall order of trouble. Her batting eyelashes and demure but firm "not before we're married" teasing are about as sincere as a beauty pageant queen's wishes for world peace. But she's irresistible -- a cuckoo bird dominatrix.

As Max, the head grifter of a pair of mother-daughter con artists, Weaver lights up the sunny, cynical farce "Heartbreakers." Weaver has always been a special delight in comedy, possessed of a manic spark that threatens to turn her imposing physical authority into a dizzy dervish. She's gotten to show off that spark in her stage work with her buddy Christopher Durang, the playwright, and on-screen in bits of "Ghostbusters" and "Working Girl," in her cameo in "Jeffrey" and in the surprise delight "Galaxy Quest." But "Heartbreakers" gives Weaver her fullest and most sustained comic role yet.

Max's method is to hook some well-off sucker, keep him begging for the sex that she claims is against her religious beliefs, reel him to the altar and then, when the schmuck is doubled over with desire, arrange to catch him in a compromising position with her daughter, Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt). A quick, lucrative annulment later and Max and Page are on to their next mark. The characters Max slips into to lure her bait provide Weaver the chance to cut up.

In the course of the movie she goes from a blond Italian-American princess to a Russian émigré with a thick accent, and Weaver gets a laugh out of each drooping "Da." The screenwriters, Robert Dunn and the team of Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, provide her with the sort of silly malapropisms that can keep you giggling for days. Complaining, in Russian mode, that the INS is about to deport her, Weaver laments, "I am loopholeless!" It's the funniest display of phony Russianisms since Mischa Auer suffered his way through "Otchi Tchornyia" in "My Man Godfrey."

Shortly after "Heartbreakers" opens, the partnership between mother and daughter starts to come undone. Page is champing to get out from under the care of her overprotective mother; Max is sure Page is still too naive to fend for herself and will wind up alone and pregnant, just as she did at the same age. After Max and Page dispatch victim No. 13, Liotta's Dean, a Jersey chop-shop owner, they find that an even bigger grifter, the IRS, has left them busted. So the two agree to one big con that will be their swan song as a team and settle on a pigeon: Tensy (Gene Hackman), a Palm Beach, Fla., tobacco billionaire who's just a few breaths ahead of an iron lung.

Hewitt's performance probably wouldn't be as funny as it is if it weren't for her darling, crinkly off-screen image as America's sweetheart, an image she gleefully defaces here. She's as slick and brittle as a new coat of nail varnish. She's also as trashy and sexy as millions of straight men have longed to see her act. There's probably no graceful way to describe the effect of her push-up bras and short, skintight dresses except to say that in years to come her wardrobe here may conceivably serve as the basis of an enterprising engineering thesis.

Next Page: A cool, casual and generous performance from Jason Lee

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