Breast Men

[StevePulaski]

Breast Men (1997)
Directed by: Lawrence O'Neil

David Schwimmer.

Rating: ★★★

Breast Men is probably the best film one could've made that features Ross Geller as a young, idealistic doctor who jiggles plastic sacks of silicone and lays his eyes on a host of women's breasts over the course of 93 minutes.

Indeed, David Schwimmer plays Dr. Kevin Saunders, who persuades his colleague Dr. William Larson (Chris Cooper) to aid him in pioneering the usage of silicone breast implants in the 1970s and 1980s. Saunders believes that with the cosmetic industry has already populated such a grand feeling of insecurity amongst women that it's unthinkable how some could not want bigger breasts. The two open a breast augmentation facility that gains a lot of traction with the right advertising approach and both men wind up going on to make untold millions. With his newfound success, Dr. Saunders becomes entranced by the more deviant and erotic possibilities of larger breasts, getting involved in the world of porn stars and strippers, whereas Dr. Larson favors a more clinical approach, particularly helping breast cancer survivors get back one of the hallmarks and identifiers of womanhood.

Shot and shown on HBO as part of their 1990s campaign to rework the image of made-for-TV movies, Breast Men plays like Boogie Nights with a more modest scale and budget, as the second-half-focus shifts largely to showing Dr. Saunders downfall. His sinful lifestyle of booze and cocaine binges becomes even more problematic when a handful of women begin experiencing problems with their newly purchased breasts. Lawsuits follows from women who have had intense pain and discomfort from their breast enhancements, including one woman who approaches Dr. Larson at a convention to flash him her now lumpy, deflated breasts. This prompts a tailspin for an industry that rose quickly and fell to criticism and scrutiny just as rapidly, only to rebound and prompt the shift from silicone implants to saline ones.

Interspersed in the film is low-grade documentary footage showing women only as a pair of breasts and a torso as they talk for sometimes a minute or two at a time about their experience with breast enhancement. We never see their faces and are mostly only given their name and their new breast size by way of a director's clapboard.

The film is based off the story of Drs. Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin, two men who went on to be plastic surgeons after developing silicone implants on behalf of the Dow Corning Corporation. Whether or not this lavish rise-and-fall story came to define Dr. Gerow and Cronin I cannot say, but it's reasonable to believe the dramatization in Breast Men to be exactly that. It also suffices to say that my fondness for Breast Men as a film of any kind of thematic significance didn't begin until Dr. Saunders began to show addiction to hard drugs and a fast lifestyle. It's then that writer John Stockwell's real focus comes alive - the story of two low-level doctors who turn into petty capitalists upon creating a product reactionaries bill as ruining the moral fabric of society before dispersing into two separate paths with two contrasting lifestyles.

The end result is a bit of everything, and a bit of a hodgepodge as a result. The film is, as stated, partly a rise-and-fall story, partly a historical account with some evident dramatization, partly a black comedy, partly a docudrama, and a courtroom drama for the last fifteen minutes. Breast Men's saving grace is that its competent performances by Schwimmer and Cooper - who age about as quickly as the film is paced - and its adequate writing thanks to a captivating subject makes it move a lot smoother and seem a lot more put-together than perhaps it actually is.

However, Breast Men gets a lot of credibility because it's, dare I say, more buttoned up than I expected. It shows the concept at hand existing as something as vulnerable as the demographic its marketed towards, and the immense pressure and stakes crashing down on the anti-heroes at the center of the film. It's not as structured as it could've been, but it's also not as sloppy either. Its lumps and imperfections almost make it that much more aesthetically appealing.

Starring: David Schwimmer, Chris Cooper, Emily Procter, and Matt Frewer. Directed by: Lawrence O'Neil.