Breakfast At Tiffany's

I know, I still have three movies to review to answer trivia questions, but I haven't gotten around to watching them yet. And true, this movie didn't even win any of the major awards (though it did take home Oscars for Best Score and Best Song for Moon River), but it was nominated for Best Actress (for Audrey Hepburn, of course) and Best Adapted Screenplay. I plan on reviewing the nominees after I finish the winners, and since I happened to watch this one on date night with my lovely fiancee last night, I figured I might as well get the review done now.

Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a fun-loving girl drifting through her life in New York City, sleeping through the days, partying through the nights, and bilking her nightly dates for $50 a pop for "change for the powder room." (In the book, Golightly was clearly a prostitute, but the film made the issue a bit more ambiguous in order to get around the censors.) She meets her new neighbor, Paul (though she calls him Fred because he reminds her of her brother), a struggling writer who is (for some reason less ambiguously) prostituting himself to his "designer," the rich, married woman who pays for his rent and clothes, until he gets his big break. The two, of course, fall in love, despite his discovery of her shady past, and her desperate resistance to being caged in by "belonging" to anybody.

Hepburn's performance walks a truly delicate balance here. Holly Golightly is the type of flaky hipster (my fiancee insists that this is not the proper use of the word, but I still think it fits) who thinks that it is too conventional to own a pet cat, but feels that it is not fighting the convention of pet ownership to simply not own a cat, so she owns a cat for the purpose of not naming it, so she can point out to others that the cat has no name because she doesn't own it, so she had no right to name it. Obnoxious, right? She drifts through life with no purpose other than to marry a rich man for his money. And, though Paul spends the entire movie being a friend to her, putting up with behavior that most people wouldn't tolerate, she says things to him that are downright cruel, just to keep him from getting too close. And yet, for all of that, she manages to remain likable, lovable, and heartbreaking. To say that there is a stand-out performance in the career of somebody as talented and appealing as Audrey Hepburn is truly a bold statement, but this is the performance that she should be remembered for, and definitely one that she should have won an Oscar for.