“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is a romantic comedy and a gradually revealed character story about a beautiful, eccentric, air headed, and inaccessible woman named Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). Golightly (who with her little black dress and long cigarette holder is one of film's most recognizable characters) is a Manhattan socialite (and something of an escort, although sex seems off the table). She meets her new neighbor Paul Varjak (George Peppard), who we learn is an author stuck in an extended creative drought. The story then shifts to his perspective as, through him, we learn more about Golightly’s past. We begin to understand Holly’s eccentric lifestyle and why she so desperately pursues a sugar-daddy, both falling in love with her and growing frustrated by her choices.
I initially found myself hating this film. Early on, I couldn’t stand Hepburn’s Golightly, seeing in her all the air-headed, beautiful people that I have known and felt manipulated by. The film plays out as a series of disjointed chapters (it was adapted by a novel from Truman Capote and felt like it), with each sequence containing characters and situations that were vaguely interesting but often unbelievable. My final beef—and if you’ve seen the film you should see this coming—had to do with Mickey Rooney’s awful, racist caricature of a Japanese landlord. Product of its time or not, it pulled me right out of the story and the whole film suffered for it.
Acknowledging this, as the film progressed, I found myself warming to our main characters. As we learn about Holly’s troubled past, her erratic behavior begins to feel forgivable. But more so, her and Paul’s unintentional romance was charming and organic. Our two mains don’t go into their friendship looking for love—Holly is looking for a rich man to take care of her and Paul has an older woman to, erm…service his needs. They’re both kids, one from tatters and the other washing up from success, learning to meet in the middle despite their problems. I found something special and romantic about that.
At the end of the day, I don’t fully know how to feel about this one, but I think I liked it. This movie is clever, and ridiculous, and pretentious, and silly, sincere, sarcastic, sentimental, and trendy, and old-fashioned, and all over the place, and yet somehow a coherent character story. But ultimately, I bought into Paul as a proxy for the audience well enough to keep me grounded through the crazy. And Hepburn's frustratingly good performance tipped the scale towards me appreciating this as a decent film.