How can you tell the bad guys from the good?  God creates us all to be in the latter category.  Another way of putting this is that He imbues us all with an innocence that this world, and our own fallen natures, tarnishes.  Yet, our first years of life are spent innocently trusting our parents and elders, and largely the world around us.  It is a sad day when that trust is broken, and it should be held on to as long as possible, for Matthew 18:3 tells us that it is the children that will inherit the Kingdom of God.  That does not mean that it will be literal children, for the most part, but those of us Jesus recognizes as His brothers and sisters through the Spirit of adoption.  Purposefully or not, some of us manage to hang on to this preternatural state, and can become victims of the kind of people we see in today’s movie, Heartbreakers (2001).  The main characters are people who prey on the weaknesses of others, their vulnerabilities, for their own gain.  They are also children of God, Jethough, and this film underscores this fact in some surprising ways.

Considering a title like Heartbreakers, you would find it surprising that it begins with a wedding (and I noted that it is in a Catholic Church) between Dean Cumanno (Ray Liotta) and Angela Nardino (Sigourney Weaver).  Angela and Dean are evidently in love, and he is eager that their reception conclude so he can consummate their union.  Catholics do this on their wedding night, too, you know.  However, she enjoys herself perhaps a little too much, drinking and dancing with anyone who offers.  Thus, when they get to their hotel room, she falls asleep shortly after getting in bed.  She awakens the next morning to him in front of her face, clearly ready to make up for lost time, but she suddenly rushes to the bathroom, sick.  Instead of waiting around for her to emerge from puking, he heads to the “office,” which is a chop shop for stolen cars.  While sulking in his behind his desk, he notices the skimpy dress of his secretary, Wendy (Jennifer Love Hewitt).  It does not take him long to give into her advances, but this is also the moment Angela visits.  She catches her husband and Wendy in a compromising position and immediately demands a divorce.  Stopping at a gas station in the Mercedes Angela received in the settlement, she is met there by Wendy.  This is when we learn that Angela is actually Max Conners, and Wendy is her daughter, Page Conners.  As their last name would suggest, they have made a career of conning unsuspecting wealthy men out of a portion of their riches, and now it is on to the next scheme.  Before doing so, Page informs her mother that she wants to go off on her own.  Max tells her daughter that the young woman is not ready, but Page insists.  Resigned, they go to the bank to withdraw their money and split the loot, but are met by Gloria Vogal (Anne Bancroft), a representative for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).  Gloria informs the two criminals that she has emptied their account for back taxes, and that they still need to come up with more money or face jail time for their crooked ways.  Because of this, Max and Page are forced to perform one more con, but this time they want it to be big enough to not only pay off the IRS, but have enough left over to be comfortable.  There is some disagreement over who the next target should be, but Max wins out, selecting the eternally smoking tobacco billionaire William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman).  While Max becomes Russian heiress Ulga Yevanova, it is up to Page to help get the ever-hacking William to go after Ulga.  This involves arranging a car accident.  While waiting for the right moment, Page walks into a bar owned by Jack Withrowe (Jason Lee).  She takes his gestures as come-ons, though he is just trying to get her order.  Leaving in an annoyed huff, she forgets her purse.  He does the gallant thing and chases after her, and thus she has to hide him when the planned fender-bender occurs.  The stunt works, and now Ulga is in William’s good graces.  As for Jack, despite seeing through Page’s façade, he is smitten by her.  Though she fights it, claiming that she is in control, she finds his down-to-earth attitude attractive, and starts spending her free time with him.  The thing that messes everything up is Dean.  Eventually, he finds Angela and regardless of everything that has happened between them, professes to still love her.  This comes just as William is proposing to Ulga, with the old man dying in the process.  Dean not only encounters Ulga trying to arrange a corpse to make William’s death look accidental, but learns about Wendy, too.  With the scam uncovered, Max desperately offers to re-pay Dean.  Page wonders with what funds Max can do this, only to be told that mom and Glorida (who is Max’s old partner Barbara), had conned Page.  Yet, when they go to the bank, they find that Barbara had cleared out all the cash.  Page has one last idea: using Jack as their mark, doing a sham wedding and getting what they can out of his bar.  It goes exactly like when of the jobs Max and Page would do, with the daughter as the bride and mom as the honeypot.  Page does not believe Jack will fall for it, yet finds him in a compromising position with Max.  Everyone is disgusted about the resulting divorce, including Dean, who declines the money.  As they drive away, seeing Page’s bitterness, Max admits to drugging Jack, being afraid of letting her daughter go.  Page is angry at first, but gets the stolen funds to buy back Jack’s bar, and they seemingly live happily ever after.  So, too, do Dean and Max, and we end with them trying to get revenge on Barbara.

Despite the main characters getting a happy ending, based on what I have told you of their doings, you might not think them worthy of the conclusion they get in Heartbreakers.  At the same time, there is a particularly Catholic aspect to how they pull cons that I can appreciate.  Despite them invariably involving weddings, they have a strict policy of not having sex before marriage.  With Dean, Max claims it is specifically because of religious beliefs, and she wears a cross around her neck to complete the illusion.  It is also done in order to speed up the process of the apparently horny men they are trying to separate from their money.  To this end, there is a common phrase that is used to describe these sensations.  After Page’s divorce, she is telling Max about how right mom is about men, claiming that there is no love, just chemicals.  There is truth in this statement.  When we have strong feelings for someone, out bodies produce hormones, the aforementioned “chemicals,” that send signals to our brains to inform us on how we should react.  Often, this is used to say that there is no God, that whatever it is we are experiencing is the result of mere animal instincts.  It was while hearing these lines in the movie that it occurred to me: who made those so-called “chemicals?”  It is the same God that created the universe and everything in it.  That such connections do not register with many is a sign of many troubling developments in our society.  The most obvious of these would be a growing atheism that seeks to reduce the miraculous to the explainable.  Another is the lack of acknowledgement that God is love.  This film talks a lot about divorce, it being a tool for economic gain.  Arguably, the more tragic divorce is the separation of God and what we call love.  Those so-called chemicals have everything to do with our Creator.  He wants our best, sacrificed His only Son for our benefit, and is thus present in those feelings.  Please understand this is not meant to be a bland, all-encompassing definition of the word, but one that speaks to how God sees us.  It is that sacrificial love that is important, and Max and Page, albeit in severely limited ways, is where we end.

I could understand your desire to see Heartbreakers being limited based on what I have told you about it.  What I take away from it, at least with Page, is a person who wants to do better.  In meeting Jack, she finds the right person with which to make a change in her life.  Max is a different story.  As such, this is a mixed recommendation.