Review of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) by David C — 22 Nov 2014

If it weren't for the ignorant, hateful caricature of a Japanese person played by Mickey Rooney, this would be a superlative movie. As it is, it manages to be a great movie despite that problem. Holly Golightly is a woman with a cultivated sense of irresponsibility. She is not irresponsible by accident or merely by nature-she's far too intelligent for that-but by design, as a means of avoiding potentially-painful entanglements such as an early marriage that robbed her of the chance to explore her identity independently. Her conscious insistence that she neither depend upon nor be depended upon extends even to her relationship with the nameless cat who shares her apartment. I don't say "her" cat, because Golightly would object to the use of the possessive. Details like that make the character believable, and Audrey Hepburn's fine acting makes her likable.

The fanciful New York lifestyle Golightly imposes upon herself is fun to experience vicariously, but the script is attentive to the distinction between "fanciful" and "fantasy." In pursuing a life that is fanciful, Golightly takes trips to Tiffany's on a whim, but because this is no fantasy she cannot actually afford anything there. Her world seems ever ready to come apart at the seams, with literal and figurative fires apt to break out at any moment. Her apartment is in disarray; to make it more than a campground would be to make an intolerable commitment to being there the next day. There are emotional costs to these fancies, and Hepburn makes them manifest in a subtly bipolar performance. Hepburn understands the character deeply, and I see in her people I have known who suffer from the same pain and have the same ways of responding to it. If the film does eventually stray from fanciful into fantasy, it is only in its conceit that George Peppard's hangdog, straight-and-narrow Paul (whom Golightly and her jet set satellites call Fred) could change a person like Golightly and make her settle down.