What a Woman's Worth

I caught the end of Ocean's Eleven on television today and I remembered a substantial complaint I had about the movie's conclusion. At the end of the movie, George Clooney asks a hypothetical question to Andy Garcia's character, Terry. He says he will help get Terry's money back if he will stop dating Julia Roberts, the icy and uninteresting art museum curator. Terry says yes - Julia Roberts happens to be miraculously watching all this on a closed-circuit feed, and decides at that moment that the relationship is over. Simply put, one of the bitchiest scenes in modern cinematic history.

How much money were we talking about here? OVER 163 MILLION DOLLARS!! Keep in mind, that money is after-tax cash sitting in the vault. To recover the losses, Andy Garcia has to make something like 300 million dollars. That, my friends - that is a large sum of money. Is Julia Roberts worth 300 million dollars? The answer is obviously no, but what's worse is that she ASSUMES she is worth 300 million dollars. In fact, she thinks she is so obviously that valuable that she doesn't even bother to get in a fight with Andy Garcia - she just straight up dumps the guy.

Furthermore, we don't really know that Andy Garcia was going to dump Julia Roberts - his character likely would say that just to get George's Clooney's information, and keep dating Julia Roberts anyways. She has no idea whether he means what he says. But she doesn't even bother to ask! What a bitch!

Wait, you say. True love should go beyond money - no sum of money equals love. But any reasonable person would deduce she doesn't love Andy Garcia. She demurs when asked if she loves him, only points out that "he doesn't make me cry" (just smacks of "rebound guy") and doesn't show much affection beyond her icy cold glances. And if she did love him, she would ask him about what happened or confront him, not just leave him at the drop of a hat.

So in taking the movie at face value here - Julia Roberts, who sucks, hears her boyfriend, whom she doesn't love, reveal that he may POSSIBLY be willing to dump her for 300 MILLION DOLLARS, immediately deduces that HE is the bad guy, and does not love HER, and then delivers a brutal breakup line and presumably never speaks to the guy ever again.

Damn, what a bitch.