Breast Men 1997, Rated R

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Starring David Schwimmer, Chris Cooper, et al.

Breast Men, starring David Schwimmer and Chris Cooper, was the made for HBO film about the history of the breast implant. Since this material was all based on the lives of real people and real discoveries in the field of breast augmentation, I was expecting a dark comedy, or a quirky, off-the-wall film. What I was not expecting, however, since the men that pioneered the silicone breast implant don't hold the same historical significance of men like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, was a drama that took itself very seriously. To director Lawrence O'Neil and screenwriter John Stockwell, I say : "C'mon, you're making a movie about two guys who work to give women bigger boobs. No matter how anyone tries to camouflage their medical discoveries as societally worthy, we all have brains enough to figure out that this film isn't Schindler's List or The Color Purple." But, nevertheless, O'Neil and Stockwell plow forward in their serious examination of cleavage.

The acting in Breast Men is passable at best, with Schwimmer still insisting on playing the dopey, lovable guy he plays on Friends, and Cooper light years away from his performance in the 1996 release, Lone Star. If I've said it once before, I've said it a million times, David Schwimmer needs to get away from his typecast role of being cute and nerdy. His agent needs to get up off his ass, stop sipping his $10 mocha lattes, and slap Schwimmer upside his head and tell him in no uncertain terms that if he doesn't play a pedophile or a mortician who has sex with dead bodies in his next film, his career will be over faster than that white rapper in the early '90's whose name may or may not have included the word 'vanilla'.

With the near constant exposure of female breasts, bevies of slutty, scantily-clad women traipsing around mansions in the hills of southern California, and the prominence of cocaine, adultery, and '70's fashions, Breast Men gives off a most unwanted and unpleasant feeling of debauchery. We are watching two rather sleazy medical doctors who, at first, make a mint by putting the equivalent of plastic bags of hair gel into women's chests, and then, after squandering away all the money they earned on this academic venture, strike it rich again some years later by charging the same women even more money to have their implants taken out.

Stockwell's screenplay is rather choppy throughout, the risk one always runs with a story that spans two or three decades, and worst of all, left all my questions about breast implants unanswered. Since my own experience with implants is as limited as Michael Jackson's experience being a normal kind of guy, I wasn't quite sure how dangerous having breast implants was--would one choose to dive on a live grenade before having silicone implants put in?--nor what differences there were between the supposedly safe saline (salt water) implants and the silicone implants.

Stockwell and O'Neil also lose points for having this film end as one character gets hit by a truck. This is bad for two reasons: 1) it is quite abrupt, and 2) fictional writers believe that having characters getting hit by trucks as a sign a writer backed himself into a corner and decided to take the easy way out. I don't care whether this was historically accurate or not, no movie should ever, and I mean ever, end with a character getting hit by a truck.

Breast Men was a rather unfocused, choppy, and shallow look at the lives of the two men whose gift to this world is seemingly the size 38DD. Pamela Lee might find this interesting, I just didn't.