From a Texas Monthly article on a group of Houston plastic surgeons, Stockwell created two composite docs and made them the pioneers and crass profiteers of the field. We meet Dr. Kevin Saunders (David Schwimmer) as a geeky Baylor med student practicing his suturing at home on an uncooked turkey. Taking a break from his weird gobblectomy, he peeps into the bedroom of a young female neighbor and watches her remove her falsies, then her bra and anoint her miniature mounds with ““breast enhancement” cream. Inspired, Saunders approaches the faculty’s resident recon structive surgeon, Dr. William Larson (Chris Cooper), with a daring proposal: ““Why can’t we build a better breast?” Offering Larson his prototype, he boasts, ““Squeeze it. Doesn’t it feel exactly like a real breast?” Larson’s reply: ““How would you know ?” He would soon enough.
With a little help from Dow-Corning, Saunders swings into the ’70s with mutton chops, polyester flares and the girl of his dreams. He operates on, then marries, the nurse who wouldn’t give him the time of day at Baylor. Inevitably, things go sour. The two millionaire partners split up. The marriage is on the rocks. Saunders is slipping toward bankruptcy when one of the slimier Dow-Corning boys introduces him to a local strip-club owner (Stockwell), and a whole new client base opens up. Suddenly he ’s backstage at the club hoovering cocaine off the postoperative breasts of one of his stripper patients. It’s a fantastically tawdry moment, and Schwimmer milks it with a sleazy intensity you’d never have guessed was in him from ““Friends.”
In 1992 the boom goes bust when the FDA bans silicone implants. Saunders hits bottom–until he realizes that insurance companies will pay him more to remove the implants than he made installing them. Adding to the movie’s astonishingly high cup cou nt, Stockwell splices in fake documentary footage of women naked from the neck down discussing how they feel about their own As, Bs or DDDs. (A similar documentary, called simply ““Breast,” aired on HBO’s sister channel Cinemax in January.)
What makes ““Breast Men” more than just a shameless gawkfest is Schwimmer’s strangely sympathetic portrait of the geek gone bad. And director Lawrence O’Neil’s ““Boogie Nights” feel for garish moral squalor–as well as clever cameos by Lisa Marie, Eve Plumb and Lyle Lovett–provides the necessary ironic winks to redeem all the prurient ones.
