Some would argue that the female breast is HBO’s reason for being, or at least its reason for being so popular.
Its late-night shows like “Real Sex” and “Sex Bytes” take every opportunity to display the feminine torso without restricting garments, and, because people are paying to have it in their homes, the channel doesn’t have to splice its movies to remove moments of intimacy and immodesty.
So it might seem at first blush that HBO is merely reaching for new heights of salaciousness in making a movie, called “Breast Men,” that purports to tell the story of the vagaries of the silicone-gel breast implant.
But more than just an excuse to show a whole lot of the title organs –which it does, everything from ridiculously ballooned to horribly disfigured examples–the movie is an arched-eyebrow probing of body image and the culture.
You may approach this expecting a late-night women’s prison flick or Russ Meyer pillowfest, but what you’ll get is more similar in tone to the channel’s ironic, savvy and successful takes on ’80s capitalism (“Barbarians at the Gate”) and oversized vicarious parental ambition (“The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom”).
Like those movies, “Breast Men” (8 p.m. Saturday) fictionalizes, telescopes and manipulates real people and events, all the while remaining within the rough outlines of the real-world tale. It is, says the sly, on-screen legend, “basically a true story, slightly augmented.”
David Schwimmer (“Friends”) and Chris Cooper (“Lone Star”) play Kevin Saunders and William Larson, two Houston plastic surgeons who in 1962 pioneer the silicon implant, which promises a natural feel and chemical stability previously unavailable.
It is rough sledding at first, as colleagues accuse them of fetishism and worse. But a discreet newspaper ad launches the men toward fortune, as they insist all the while that they are helping womens’ body image and bringing respectability to a discredited branch of medicine.
In the 1970s, though, tensions–or, perhaps, Schwimmer’s sideburns and leisure suits–dissolve the partnership. His Dr. Saunders has to strike out on his own and soon slides into the seedier side of the business. He becomes plastic surgeon to the strippers and the stars, snorting cocaine off of his mammoth handiwork and bragging that he knows “Victoria’s real secret.”
The storm cloud on the horizon, of course, is the class-action suit that throws breast augmentation into ill repute and bankrupts Dow Corning, a leading maker of the fluid sacs.
Interspersed are documentary-style testimonials from faceless, shirtless women intended to emphasize that this brand of surgery isn’t just about looking better writhing around on a stage. For many women, breasts are inescapably and profoundly central to their self-image.
The movie begins, after all, with a biblical quote about a woman’s lack of breasts making her a poor marriage candidate. It ends by noting a) that the medical evidence does not support the claims in the silicone lawsuits and b) that women are apparently clamoring for new kinds of surgery.
Still, while the filmmakers–writer John Stockwell (“Undercover”) and director Lawrence O’Neil (“Throwing Down”)–do an admirable job creating characters and ideas that are neither entirely black nor white, they also pay more dramatic attention to the sexual nature of the situations than to their psychological repercussions. Because of that, all the breasts on display never really lose their erotic charge.
But that doesn’t make the movie vapid or cheap. The detached, wry tone may save it from having to answer its hard questions, such as, If it is wrong to surgically enhance a small breast, is it also wrong to fix a cleft lip? And it may have been more powerful if the same idea had been executed by women, who would presumably be informed by something more than ironic distance.
But this still ends up a reasonably thoughtful, and unflaggingly entertaining, journey through one culture’s experience with a kind of ritual scarification you won’t find in National Geographic.
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