Metrano as Entertainer Tim Browne as Kelly's Boyfriend Jean Scoppa as Flower Girl Greg Scherick as Young Boy Style The film is a black comedy, examining love and hypocrisy through a lens of pointed, subtle humor. Though it contains broad jokes, occasionally going for "laughs without shame", Elaine May is credited with emotionally grounding the film and providing "a real understanding of character" through eliciting the kind of "caustic, almost powerful humor that comes from moments of wincing recognition when human foibles are accurately captured and revealed". As another reviewer wrote in Sight & Sound, May's strength lies in her "obsessive and affectionate observations of character". May shared with her late comedy partner Mike Nichols (1931–2014) a sparse, dialogue-oriented style and a quizzical perspective. She places an emphasis on character comedy; The Hollywood Reporter commented on her stylistic decisions to derive humor "from situations rather than obvious one-line jokes" and make comedic choices which "flow effortlessly from rhythmic dialogue, explosions of laughter". The New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote: "Elaine May has the rarest kind of comic gift: the ability to create a world seen comically". May's focus on comedic honesty, backlit by pain and misfortune, stylistically influenced a new generation of films. She pushed comedy into a "golden age as the result of the rise of the semi-surreal comedy of mishap, pain, insult, and desperation". Themes Love and Jewish identity The Heartbreak Kid is a particularly Jewish story; as Thomas Meehan wrote in The Saturday Review, the film is a "triumph of New York Jewish humor", and The Village Voice called it "the culminating work of Hollywood's Jewish new wave". All the filmmakers are Jewish—Friedman, Simon, May, the producer Edgar J. Scherick, and the composers Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The story follows Lenny Cantrow, the embodiment of the Jewish archetype of the "schlemiel" (bungler), as he dumps Lila (Jeannie Berlin), a "kvetchy Jew" and "sloppy, incipient yenta", for the girl of his dreams, an all-American WASP. The film is a deadpan fever dream of shiksa-chasing, taking place in what Bruce Jay Friedman dubs in the original short story as the land of "strange blonde people". The character of Lila in particular has been labelled extremely stereotypical; Film Quarterly likened her to a female Portnoy, publishing a review stating "Philip Roth's friendly anti-Semitism is strikingly similar to Friedman's". Some critics have expressed concerns that the movie forwards a stilted vision