Once they’re home, they engage in a detailed and lengthy shootout, the visualization of the subtext of any marriage movie. They’re full of disappointment, a sense of betrayal, and anger. They trade insults—“Your aim’s as bad as your cookin’, sweetheart”—and give each other challenges. “Come on, honey, come to Daddy,” he taunts her after knocking her down, but she beans him with a frying pan and says, “Who’s your daddy now?” During this melee, which gets really ugly, the house is totally wrecked. They finally stand off, gun to gun, each ready for the other to fire, but Pitt lowers his weapon first: “I can’t do it.” They embrace, kiss, and knock each other around the house, through the wreckage and over the broken glass, in a display of hot sex.
The next morning they are united, but under attack from both of their employers for having violated the rule never to marry inside the business. (They didn’t know.) From this moment forward, the film is nothing but action, and it begins with the complete blowing up of their suburban home. That marriage is over, shattered to smithereens. They steal a neighbor’s car and roar off in an elaborate chase in which, as they run, they are followed by a fleet of well-armed black cars. Having been caught in early-morning deshabille, Pitt battles in his underwear, shooting, grappling, tossing weapons, while she drives at high speed, skillfully maneuvering the freeway (but only after she’s insisted he let her take over and drive, a marital moment). As they engage in combat, they have another conversation about marriage, slowly revealing the truth to one another. (“I was never in the Peace Corps … I was married once before … I went to Notre Dame and was an art history major … I’m Jewish … My parents died when I was five”—this means her parents at their wedding were really actors—and as for her bad cooking? She never actually made any of it.) When it’s all over, and they’ve vanquished their foes, she comments that “We have to do every conversation we’ve ever had over,” and he laments, “I can’t believe I brought my real parents to our wedding.”
Mr. and Mrs. Smith sets a rhythm—action, destruction, and chaos—over which are laid traditional marital quarrels and nags. As the couple work together to save their lives, they do what the movie married couple has always done: they bicker. (A co-worker, Vince Vaughn, says, “You’re Macy’s and Gimbel’s.”) In the end, they remain consistent. Their lives in danger, they work together and win out. How different is this from Made for Each Other in 1939? A crisis saves the marriage of Jimmy Stewart and Carole Lombard when their little son falls ill. A crisis saves the marriage of Pitt and Jolie when people start shooting at them. Their final gun battle takes place in a suburban store full of things that married couples would buy—clothing, furniture, household goods. As is always the case, marriage is destroyed and restored, shown to be unworkable, and then worked out. In the end, they’re back at the marriage counselor, this time looking radiant and fit, explaining that there were times when they just wanted to kill one another, but …
Bickering, arguing, and exchanging snappy—even insulting—repartee had always been the language of love in American movies, and one of the basics of the marriage-movie relationship. These modern films brought an escalation of that bickering into hideous argument and finally revealed it for what it was: the battle of the sexes, well armed and deadly. Just listen to a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which George and Martha try to kill each other with verbiage, and then watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith shooting at each other from dining room to kitchen, and you realize it’s all the same thing. George and Martha kill with words; Mr. and Mrs. Smith just kill.
In the case of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a couple of killer assassins each found the perfect mate—another killer assassin, someone with shared interests, skills, and hobbies. It’s amusing, and one of the most original commentaries on marriage, the marriage movie, and marriage counseling ever put on film. (It was a big box-office success, but a critical failure.) Because of the violence and the car chases and the blowing up of buildings, many did not appreciate what a wonderful joke on marriage movies the film really was.
Movies such as Roses and Smith really were putting paid to the ideas of the original marriage-movie concept. Presumably, out of their mushroom clouds would come something new, even if slightly poisonous. What happened was a kind of death, and certainly a reconsideration of sorts, but not necessarily anything startlingly new. This has always been the problem of the marriage movie—how could its situation really be varied or made fresh?
Some movies solved the problem simply. Plots dropped the before and the after and just gave the ritual event. The movie showed the wedding planning and ceremony and nothing else—no real romantic-comedy prelude, and no discouraging issue-ridden aftermath. Movies started focusing on weddings. They became like issues of Consumer Reports. There were Muriel’s Wedding (1995), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Betsy’s Wedding (1990), Father of the Bride (both parts, 1991 and 1995), 27 Dresses (2008), Bride Wars (2009), The Wedding Singer (1998), Wedding Crashers (2005), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Runaway Bride (1999), Bridesmaids (2011), Jumping the Broom (a 2011 African-American variation), and a depressing list of others. Such movies put the wedding onscreen, and had everything in the plot linked to it, to its ritual, its wardrobe, its participants, its families, and its blatant consumerism. In her New York Times review of Bride Wars in 2009, critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “Do Hollywood studio executives think that women have a gene for tulle? Neural receptors for Vera Wang? … To judge from a clutch of recent titles, License to Wed, Margot at the Wedding, Evening, Enchanted, The Heartbreak Kid, Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, 27 Dresses, and Maid of Honor—the walk down the aisle has picked up increasing speed.”16
The wedding ceremony on film has a curious history. Sometimes movies would begin with a wedding (Our Betters) or end with one (It’s a Great Feeling, 1949), in which Doris Day gives up show business to return to her small home town and marry her high school sweetheart (Errol Flynn in a joke cameo). It was an opportunity for the costume department to blow the budget, and certainly one for lavishly adorning a beautiful female star. And yet, with notable exceptions, it was seldom lingered over in films.17 Unless the bride was the young Elizabeth Taylor, whose beauty was worth stopping the show for (Father of the Bride, 1950), or the wedding was a grand state occasion with Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great (The Scarlet Empress, 1934) or a Ruritanian fantasy with a bride who looks like Madeleine Carroll or Deborah Kerr (the two versions of The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937 and 1952), weddings were often ignored, aborted, truncated, or used as a place for serious questions.
Brides are always running away. When Claudette Colbert comes down the aisle in It Happened One Night (1934), her father (Walter Connolly) tells her that Clark Gable is really a good guy—does she really want to marry the effete Sky King waiting at the altar? (She doesn’t. She runs off.) When Rita Hayworth moves forward toward Lee Bowman in Cover Girl (1944), Otto Kruger shows her the little pearl Gene Kelly found for her. She, too, runs off, and is soon dancing joyously down the street with both Kelly and Phil Silvers. In It Had to Be You (1947), Ginger Rogers goes three times to the altar, in three spectacular wedding gowns, each time running away until she finds her true love, Cornel Wilde, a fireman.18 The very march down the aisle is when the audience is shown where the future trouble will lie. In Romance on the High Seas (1948), as Janis Paige walks, holding the arm of S. Z. Sakall, she asks him to just look at the way her groom (Don DeFore) is ogling one of the bridesmaids. Meanwhile, DeFore himself is asking his best man to notice how his bride is flirting with one of the men she’s passing by. It’s all right there—movies have little faith in the wedding ceremony. It isn’t even necessary to have the big dramatic Jane Eyre moment in which someone rushes in to warn the bride that the groom is already wed, or vice versa; it’s enough to show the gown, the walk, the guests, the flowers, and to hear that ominous threat of a tune: “Here Comes the Bride.”
Some weddings on film are really grim. Three film-noir movies present weddings in settings designe
d to indicate there will be no happily-ever-after. In Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth weds Glenn Ford inside an office, and the audience watches through the window from the outside. It’s pouring, and the ceremony is blurred through the ominously rain-streaked window. In Angel Face (1952), Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum (both on trial for the murder of her stepmother and father) are wed in prison. They are serenaded by a motley group of female inmates, one of whom gushes through her toothless mouth, “We wish you two kids all the happiness in the world.” Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, the youthful stars of Nicholas Ray’s first film, They Live by Night (1949), are introduced in the film before the credits. Underneath their images are the words: “This boy … and this girl … were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” A thief on the run, Granger proposes to the lost-lamb O’Donnell, and as they disembark from a bus and look around for a place to wed, they see a neon sign flashing: Marriages Performed. They slowly walk across the dark street, burdened by coats and luggage, bathed in shadows. When they ring the doorbell of the house with the sign, it plays a mechanical “Here Comes the Bride.” For twenty dollars, and another five for the ring, a bald and sinister old man does indeed “perform” their ceremony. “Marriages Performed” is a good slogan for movie marriages in general. They are often acted with no real conviction, and with a sense of danger lingering in the wording of the vows.
Movie marriage scenes come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the low-budget quickie ceremony for Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell in They Live by Night … (Photo Credit 3.10)
… or the granddaddy of all the “let’s put on a really big show” wedding movies, Father of the Bride, in which Spencer Tracy brings the exquisite young Elizabeth Taylor down the aisle in full regalia. (Photo Credit 3.11)
Movies presenting marriage boiled down to the ritual that initiates it—the wedding—illustrate where audiences had arrived regarding marriage. It had become like Valentine’s Day or Halloween: we knew there was a reason behind it, we knew something had triggered its celebration, we knew there was an explanation—but exactly what that was had become a bit fuzzy. But, hey, who cares? Let’s put on the witch hat and go trick-or-treating. Couples began putting on the gown and the top hat and cutting the cake—it was the party that mattered. Of course, a beautiful wedding had become a big box-office draw before the late 1990s and early 2000s in movies like Father of the Bride (1950) and A Wedding (1978). Father of the Bride was one of the great hits of the 1950s (inspiring both its own sequel and the remake and sequel of the 1990s). It was an amusing and loving story of family relationships, and of the father’s confusion, consternation, and ultimate pride as he married off his only daughter at great expense. A Wedding, on the other hand, was directed by Robert Altman, and its focus was more cynical, its family all fighting with each other, and its milieu definitely nouveau riche.
Centering everything in a film on the ritual of marriage, however, became a phenomenon of later decades. In Betsy’s Wedding, the two least important people are the couple being wed, but the most important event in the movie is their wedding, as it is being planned in opposite war camps by their parents. His, wealthy suburbanites, want things to be “correct”—as they define it—and her parents, mostly her Italian dad, just want to prove they can spend as much as anybody when it comes to their daughter’s happiness. There is almost no screen story time given to the marrying couple (Molly Ringwald and Dylan Walsh)—who cares about them? But there’s plenty of marriage on display. Betsy’s father (Alan Alda, the Italian dad) is wed to Madeline Kahn (who’s Jewish and just wants to make sure the groom stomps the wedding goblet). Kahn’s sister (Catherine O’Hara) is unhappily wed to the adulterous Joe Pesci, and there are also the groom’s parents and Alan Alda’s mother and her dead husband, who’s still complaining about her cooking. All the marriages are clichés: Alda and Kahn happy, happy, dancing in the kitchen, and happily bickering in clever Neil Simon–esque one-line zingers; O’Hara and Pesci, with him cheating on her with his blond secretary and her secretly buying up his business under an assumed name; and the mama remembering old grandpop while old grandpop himself (conveniently dead, appearing only to Alda) comments wryly on everything she says. In case this isn’t enough to goose up the box office, there’s an unwed daughter (Ally Sheedy) who’s a cop. She hooks up with a courtly young wiseguy (Anthony LaPaglia) in what is essentially the main love story of the film, a mini-romcom.
Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer are the couple in The Story of Us, which contemplates once again the highs and lows of marriage. There’s a Venetian getaway full of love and food and wine … (Photo Credit 3.12)
… and a depressed sense of defeat and alienation back home and in bed. (Photo Credit 3.13)
The young couple just want a simple marriage, and as it balloons, Betsy says, “Everybody’s got this emotional investment in this thing.” Her statement is an explanation of how marriage is being depicted. The ritual wedding becomes an excuse to both deflect marital problems and define them sharply through the ritual event. “You marry each other but you have to worry about all these other people,” says Betsy’s mom. On the wedding day, it rains; Betsy (a student at FIT) has designed her own bizarre wedding outfit (white top hat, white cowboy boots, and a Vera Wang–style dress altered to show off her legs); the tent collapses, and everybody has a good time. Marriage isn’t of enough interest to carry the plot, but it can be an excuse for a good party—and some new cowboy boots.19
As the millennium date was crossed, the poor marriage movie—always a challenge, always a chore—chugged forward, keeping itself afloat if the business of movies felt a way to sell it could be found. In 1999, just before the millennium, the topic had stirred a bit. There was Runaway Bride (not really about marriage, but about avoiding it), American Beauty (another movie that told us that people in the suburbs were all idiots), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick’s much-debated sexual adventure starring Tom Cruise and his then-wife, Nicole Kidman), Me, Myself, and I (an Australian film in which a single career woman, Rachel Griffiths, learns what her life would have been had she wed), An Ideal Husband (it’s an 1895 comedy by Oscar Wilde but still had much to say about husbands, wives, marriage—and blackmail), and The Story of Us (1999).
The Story of Us affirms the arrival of a type of marriage movie that would now prevail: the therapy session. This format had begun to appear as far back as Bob & Carol, but now it dug in to stay. While the audience sits helplessly in their seats, an unhappy couple talk about their marriage. And talk. And talk. And talk. They talk to their friends about their problems. They talk to each other. They talk directly to the camera, both together and alone, as if they were facing a therapist. The only people they don’t talk to about the death of their relationship, interestingly, are their children, who they agree must be spared the news. As a result, there’s no dramatic climax in which someone, anyone (such as the children), has to face anything. They just talk. This talking—the constant analyzing and telling everything—becomes the new purpose to the marriage movie.
The Story of Us stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple who have been married for fifteen years.20 While their children are away at summer camp, they decide to try a trial separation, since “fighting” has become “the condition, not the exception” and is now the “language of their relationship.” In the first presentation of Willis and Pfeiffer with their two children, however, the family sits around the dinner table in their magnificent Craftsman home, happily playing word games together. The image is that of the typically happy sitcom family, but as soon as the children leave the table, Willis says, “Look, I don’t really care what we do on our anniversary,” and she adds, “Just as long as the kids see us leaving the house together.” This inability to tell the children the truth will become what ends up holding them together, a shaky premise. As the movie moves slowly to this conclusion, it has a lot to say about marital misery: “Love is just lust in disguise, and lust fades” … “The loudest silences are
the ones in which the silence is filled with everything that’s been said” … “There are some hurts you can never really get over” … and “You love who we were—you couldn’t possibly love who we’ve become”—all this and the usual “I love you” and “I hate you.” After they decide to stay together, they conclude that “it’s hard, much harder than I thought, but you don’t just give up.” The film tells us that they lived “mostly happily ever after.” Although The Story of Us is couched in the cloak of honesty—marriage is miserable, hard to make work, burdened by kids, careers, daily life, and boredom, you stick together anyway—but that is essentially the message that marriage movies always provided. The Story of Us breaks no new ground.
In 2000, The Family Man, with Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni, magically transports a ruthless exec into a married life. It was a smart movie that had three weeks on best box-office lists but then quietly disappeared.
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