Peyton Reed's The Break-Up is awkward, uncomfortable, excruciating, sad, kind of heartbreaking, and just the teensiest bit funny. Like going to a dinner party and sitting with your hands in your lap and your face staring at your plate as the hosts snipe at each other and zero in on soft spots and jab, then identify those sensitive internal buttons marked "Push me" and sadistically push.

You chew in tense silence.

Which is to say, it's a fascinating portrait of two ordinarily boring people at odds, cringe-inducing but watchable without ever feeling completely finished.

The movie, I mean.

You're gonna hate it.

Or maybe not.

The film gets so close to the mundane problems of everyday couples, and perhaps the mundane problems of the real relationship between actors Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, your tolerance for so much tension and so little insight into it will likely depend on how willing you are to admit you slow down for car accidents and silently relish fierce public arguments. That awkwardness, in other words, is not entirely intentional; the film never digs into a comfortable rhythm. But Reed (and Vaughn, who shares a story credit with the screenwriters) builds in a surprising amount of awkwardness by design. It's not comedy.

Or romantic comedy - unless you recognize yourself in the film's screaming fits and easy frustrations, then it's kind of romantic to think you share problems with Aniston, if not her taut and bronzed physique. (She looks so impossibly good here, the movie has the nerve to suggest, in a scene with Judy Davis, she looks terrible; you scan her face for a sign that it's true.)

The Break-Up, despite the breezy Wedding Crashers fun those misleading commercials are selling, walks its own unique path. With very mixed results; but the good bits approach genius. Think War of the Roses, if you're looking for a touchstone; or Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage retooled as a Thursday night sitcom on NBC.

This makes sense seeing how Reed debuted a few years back with a delightfully over-the-top cheerleader movie, Bring It On; then followed up with a lavish homage to the swinging '60s, Down With Love. Even if he did reshoot the ending after audiences asked for a more hopeful denouement, even if the broad performances and accessible trimmings suggest the film we thought we were getting, he surprises us with a summertime relationship movie featuring well-known stars that dares to suggest these two are not a match made in heaven - or even Chicago.

After a prelude at Wrigley Field where yammering, fleshy Gary (Vaughn) meets self-possessed, svelte Brooke (Aniston) - their ill-conceived match is more obvious than the stench coming from the men's room - we're deposited at the end of a two-year relationship. And why the end?

Because of who they are.

Most movies dig into the details of a slow, gradually declining love. This one banks heavily on chemistry then doesn't offer enough opportunities for it before they're tearing at each other. Probably because Gary is a jerk and chemistry would be a strain. To be specific, he's a selfish jerk. The star attraction of a Michigan Avenue tour-bus business, he doesn't do much more than trash-talk 12-year-olds on Xbox Live (a very funny bit), watch SportsCenter, and complain when Brooke asks him to run out and please buy some lemons.

This is not a balanced love.

This is the story of a woman who frees herself of a giant loser - literally. Already taller than everyone else in the room, Vaughn has put on so much weight here, his head resembles a fireplug. He still has a hustling rhythm all his own, and it's still a blast to listen to him roll. But his (and Reed's) attempt at mining the emotional underbelly of his Frat Pack pictures with Ben and Owen and Will - a secondary goal, I think - primarily results in him looking pale and sweaty.

The irony of The Break-Up is that the one time Reed could have relied on his love of excess, he plays it straight. A Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola might have landed the right balance of anomie and dark comedy; so as it stands, there's not enough poetry here in the images, not enough hurt in the dialogue, as hurtful as it gets. The best bits are the many tossed-off ones: Davis, looking like Michael Jackson, joyfully steamrolls through every scene she's in; Jason Bateman is a nervous hoot; same for Vincent D'Onofrio; while Jon Favreau (Vaughn's Swingers co-star) is misplaced ego in bad T-shirts.

So what about the real love?

Does Aniston (getting divorced while this was made) show signs of a breakdown? Do you discern her emotional state in the nastiest scenes? Nah. After the excellent Friends with Money, she's back to her old nervous sitcom eyes and confidence that veers awfully close to smugness. It's beneath her to let us too close to who she is, and that's too bad, because Vaughn, if nothing else, comes off like a generous lout.

"I'm the talent," he shouts at D'Onofrio, referring to his place in their tour bus empire. "They sign up a month in advance just to see me! And they'll wait around for the next bus - to see me!"

He means his character.

I think he does, anyway.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com

or 419-724-6117.

First Published June 2, 2006, 10:19 a.m.