These scenes all show a couple alone together, in their private time, and reveal how they behave when not under scrutiny. They are about silent communication, years of shared experience, secret confidences, and common ideas. They are also about the one constant that can be found in the marriage movie: the inexplicable nature of any relationship between any two human beings that stands the test of time.
Married Life (2007) is a summarizing film. On the one hand, it’s old-fashioned, concerning adultery, yearnings, disappointments in life, and strange marital loyalties that exist without the mates being fully aware of them. On the other hand, it’s a bizarro mixture of what Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide calls “social commentary, soap opera, and noirish melodrama, set in 1949.” It’s a story in paralysis; it tells us the marriage film is right where it’s always been. Based on a novel by John Bingham (Five Roundabouts to Heaven), it presents marriage in a very low-key manner. Not much happens, but a lot could happen at any moment. Superbly acted by the quartet of Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, and Rachel McAdams, it’s about nothing but marriage and therefore is authentically representative of the modern attempt at the form. The story can be simply told: Pat (Clarkson) and Harry (Cooper) are happily married, an ideal couple, admired by their single womanizer friend, Richard (Brosnan). That’s the surface. Underneath the surface, Harry is having a secret affair with Kay (McAdams), whom he plans to marry after dumping Pat, who is herself having a secret affair with a young neighborhood stud. When Richard meets Kay, he wants her, and sets about stealing her from Harry. Just before Harry learns of this, however, he has decided that he dreads hurting Pat too much. His leaving her, he assumes, would kill her, so he decides he should solve the problem by simply killing her himself, to spare her feelings. In the end, he arrives home in time to rescue her from her poisoned medicine, and Richard and Kay marry. All live—if not happily—apparently at least forever after.
The film is grounded in traditional marriage issues: adultery and murder. It uses a narrator (Brosnan’s Richard) to contemplate the meaning of it all for the viewer. “This is my friend,” he says at the beginning, about Harry. “He’s married. He likes his wife. It can happen.” However, Richard defines himself as a man who has always assumed that marriage was “a mild kind of illness, like the chicken pox or the flu, from which I was safely immune.” In the hands of an Ernst Lubitsch, the film might have been a slyly sophisticated romp. Under a Billy Wilder, it could have been cynical but still romantic; and under a Preston Sturges it could have rocketed around the neighborhood like a chimpanzee on roller skates. But somehow, even with talented acting and skilled writing and directing (both by Ira Sachs), it just seems tired and bewildered.
Tired and bewildered, oddly enough, is the right approach for the marriage movie of 2007. As events unfold, Brosnan’s comments, Cooper’s sad face, McAdams’s pulchritude, and Clarkson’s obvious intelligence mesh to present something akin to truth. An audience can see that Harry wants romance, while Pat wants sex. Kay can only enjoy sex with Richard, and Richard can only believe in romance with Kay. In the end, the movie presents the mystery of marriage: why do people do it, and if they do it, why do they stay together? “And so Harry and Pat lived their lives together in the way that couples do,” says Brosnan’s narration. “A man who tried to poison his wife found out he’d be lost without her.” The final scene shows the two couples, surrounded by a roomful of friends, happily playing charades while Pat’s studly lover acts out the word. “Whoever in this room knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you,” says the narrator, “please raise your hand. I know you can’t.”24
Married Life is always complicated. Pierce Brosnan loves and marries Rachel McAdams … (Photo Credit 3.18)
… who had an affair with Chris Cooper …
… who is married to Patricia Clarkson. They’re all friends. There’s no easy explanation. And that’s marriage.
It’s the perfect ending to a movie that has nothing to tell us about marriage except what most of us already know: it can’t be explained. The longer it lasts, the more committed people become, even if they’ve wanted to kill each other along the way. The difficulty of a movie presenting marriage in its honestly misterioso form—without any true action or resolution—is illustrated by the fact that Married Life actually had three other possible endings. Each of them concluded by having Harry and Pat’s son marry, with everyone present as happy guests. In the first variation, on the drive home, Pat says “We’re so lucky life’s come to moments like this,” and their sincere love is palpable. Harry then looks out the car window and sees a large highway sign advertising the brand of household poison he was going to give her. He runs off the road and crashes, killing her. He then asks Richard to kill him with the same poison (“You owe me”) and Richard does so, ending up confessing in court to his mercy killing. In the second variation, Richard is also asked to perform the murder and does so, but the film ends with a memory shot of the past, with Pat and Harry from earlier in life, seen from the rear, holding hands as they walk toward their son’s home. There is no court trial. In the third version, Harry observes the sign, looks momentarily puzzled or wary, and merely drives on by. Nobody dies.
The four endings show why movies about marriage are hard to make. After all, Harry did try to kill Pat, and shouldn’t he be punished? And yet, why should Pat—merely the neighborhood adulteress—have to die to resolve the actions of these two guys? What’s wrong with the three endings that are not used is that two of them are nothing but plot twists, and one offers an audience nothing. The ending that was chosen gets it right: “Who can explain what really goes on in a marriage?” it asks. Raise your hand. And that’s why marriage movies are hard to make … and always have been.
After more than one hundred years of making movies about marriage, the American film business never really changed its formula, never really found new ways to tell the story, and varied its purposes only because of the changing social climate. There have been modifications, of course: currently, marriage movies are being treated as if they are romantic comedies. Where earlier films showed two people searching to find what they might have together, today we see two unhappy marrieds trying to find what they once had but have since lost: Hope Springs (2012, with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones), for example. In older movies, sex was forbidden to unwed lovers, creating tension and excitement onscreen, but now sex is fully available, so that the big excitement comes from: can a couple rekindle the flame, and create a new kind of tension and excitement? Marriage—now an unnecessary status—is the new basis for “romcom.” All the twists, all the will-they-or-won’t-they-find-a-way-to-do-its, all the desire, the yearning, the sexual frustration lie in marriage rather than outside it.
Even so, despite new technologies like color and wide screen … despite the use of flashbacks and out-of-time sequences … despite Depression, war, and sexual revolution, despite international influences, despite brand-new topics such as same-sex marriage, sperm donors, and surrogate mothers, the marriage movie has remained the story the audience already knew. The bottom line of couple, situation, and problems, treated as comedy or caution (with clothes, bathrooms, and kitchens), stayed in place, too familiar and ordinary to even be recognized officially as a real genre. Over time, stories of marriage slowly grew less and less dramatic, slowing down to an almost cinema-vérité movement toward realism, with no resolution or explanation to be found, and certainly with no explanation of what kept any couple together. Real marriage remains a locked-room mystery, and the only people who hold the key to open it are the two people inside. In over one hundred years of filmmaking, the marriage movie flatlined … but somehow never died.
1 According to Andrew J. Cherlin’s book, Marriage-Go-Round, today nearly half of American marriages end up in the divorce court, which is even more than in liberal Sweden.
2 The film was shot with a handheld 16mm camera and later blown up to 35mm.
3 This in and of
itself is not necessarily new. Blondie and Dagwood are only one example. The difference is on the basic focus and the attitude taken toward it.
4 In the July 10, 2011, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Heather Havrilesky, a shrewd observer of the cultural scene, compared Kramer vs. Kramer to the current television sitcom Happily Divorced, starring Fran Drescher: “If you want to get a sense of how drastically the mood around divorce has shifted in American popular culture in the 30 years since Kramer vs. Kramer, spend a half hour with Fran Drescher’s new TV Land sitcom Happily Divorced … These days, divorce doesn’t sob and drink to excess; it dons a joyful Kabuki mask to obscure the anguish of marital bliss gone sour.” Happily Divorced is about a wife who finds out her husband is gay, although after their divorce, they continue to cohabit for financial reasons while still trying to find new mates. The idea is based on Drescher’s real-life experience.
5 Indeed, the commonly accepted, oft-repeated view of Sex and the City is that it’s not about women at all, but “gay men with vaginas.”
6 The transitions in time are marked by wonderful animated UPA cartoons, which are valued by animation historians.
7 On Golden Pond (1981), an adaptation of a successful play, found Oscars and box-office gold largely due to its star casting of Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Jane Fonda. Ostensibly a movie about a long and loving marriage, it was more a story about the reconciliation of a harsh parent and a rebellious daughter.
8 In keeping with the new morality, Streep and De Niro very definitely have an affair, unlike the oblique did-they-or-didn’t-they? presentation of Brief Encounter.
9 Even Jane had her jungle kitchen. In Tarzan Escapes (1936), she proudly tells a visitor, “I designed the kitchen myself.”
10 A cartoon in the New Yorker by P. C. Vey suggested another purpose: as a husband reaches for his wife, who’s occupied at the stove, she’s saying, “Not now. I’m cooking to avoid intimacy.”
11 These films were originally Father of the Bride (1950) and The Bishop’s Wife (1947). In 1986, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) also had been successfully remade as The Money Pit.
12 Mad Men turned back the clock to depict a 1960s marriage from a 2000 point of view.
13 The key character of the football star who became a paraplegic had already been completed with his marriage to the mother of his little son. The couple are happy; he’s a devoted father; and they live in New York, where he is successfully employed. Interestingly, two other key characters from the series aren’t included in the final wrap‑up of relationships: the smartest boy and the prettiest girl. These two have left their small hometown to attend college at Rice and Vanderbilt, respectively. They are out of the marriage mix, a somewhat sinister and subtle class distinction.
14 In 2010, one of the strangest shows about marriage ever conceived was launched by Jerry Seinfeld: The Marriage Ref, in which a panel of celebrities listens to the fights of real-life married couples and then vote on who’s right. Seinfeld commented, “All marriages are based on a sitcom premise: what if you and I tried to stay together for the rest of our lives? … The joke of marriage is that you can’t leave.”
15 This movie should not be confused with the 1941 film of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard as a couple who discover they aren’t legally wed—one of the “we’re not married” films.
16 Dargis’s review also mentions What Happens in Vegas and Rachel Getting Married. Her conclusion? “Die, Bridezilla, die!”
17 World War II was a time in which there were exceptions, as in such films as Thirty Seconds over Tokyo or The Clock. Even then, however, Lana Turner questions herself at the altar in Marriage Is a Private Affair, and The Clock’s ceremony is in a crowded justice of the peace’s office, with no family or friends. Heartburn (1986) is one of the few movies in which the actual marriage vows are fully spoken.
18 There are so many of these runaway-bride movies that Elizabeth Kendall titled her book on screwball comedy The Runaway Bride.
19 Around 2001, a new ritual regarding the fashions of lavish weddings emerged: Trash the Dress. Instead of lovingly storing their wedding dresses in mothballs, brides began to hire photographers to record the all-out destruction of the gown. Visiting city dumps, beaches, wet fields, city streets, and abandoned buildings while dragging the dress behind her, a bride celebrated the end of her wedding and the stress it had caused by “trashing the dress.” The resulting photographs, which featured the new wife ripping, tearing, mutilating, painting, smearing, and crushing her expensive wedding gown, were then placed in the traditional wedding album, a new-fashioned keepsake for the future. Various newspapers reported this phenomenon, with one reporter asking a bride who’d lain down across railroad tracks in her dress a simple question: why? She had no answer.
20 Paul Reiser plays a friend but is unbilled in the cast lists. In retrospect, that seems significant.
21 Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) works a variation on 1937’s The Awful Truth, in which Cary Grant was possibly a cheater, so Irene Dunne divorced him—right up front in the plot. This time it’s the wife (Julianne Moore) who definitely has been having an affair and wants a divorce. The husband (Steve Carell) has to learn to date once again and cope with his busted life as well as his three kids. He’s taught by Ryan Gosling (a “bar stud Henry Higgins,” said critic Owen Gleiberman). This light romantic comedy has a streak of melancholy running underneath.
22 Kane itself tells the story of three bad marriages: that of Kane’s parents (his mother sends him away from his brutal father), his first marriage to a society belle (encapsulated by the famous breakfast-table sequence), and the dismal excess of his second marriage to the hapless mistress he encounters because she has a toothache.
23 In his Entertainment Weekly “Final Cut” column of July 23, 2010, the perceptive critic Mark Harris made a positive point about the lesbian couple: “They’re not intended to be role models for gay coupledom. They and their marriage are, however, recognizably human.”
24 It’s not unlike the mystery of 1929’s Sunrise. Who knows or can explain what really motivates any single marriage?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In researching marriage movies for this book, I scoured old movie magazines and popular magazines (Life, Look, Ladies Home Journal, etc.) to find ads for motion pictures and articles on marriage and divorce. I also read reviews of movies in The New York Times, Variety, movie magazines, and other newspapers. The American Film Institute Catalogs were an invaluable source for categories such as “marriage” and “divorce” in silent films. For the past five years I have also been avidly reading advice columns and articles in magazines and newspapers on marriage and divorce. What I learned was pretty much what I already knew: marriage is a mystery. Some people can make it work, some can’t. As William Goldman famously said about the movie business itself, when it comes to marriage, nobody knows anything.
Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. “Code: To Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures and the Reasons Supporting It,” June 13, 1934.
Barry, J. F., and E. W. Sargent. Building Theater Patronage: Management and Merchandising. New York: Chalmer’s Publishing Co., 1927.
Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Bennetts, Leslie. “The Truth About American Marriage: A Parade Poll Special Report.” Parade, September 21, 2008.
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
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“Divorce Rate in America,” Style Section, The New York Times, August 29, 2010.
Douglas,
Barbara. “Trash the Dress.” The Middletown Press, June 23, 2011.
Eyman, Scott. Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Gallup, George, et al., Gallup Looks at the Movies: Audience Research Reports, 1940–1950. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1979.
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Committed. New York: Viking, 2010.
Graham, Katharine, Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Haag, Pamela. “The Future of Marriage.” New York Post, May 29, 2011.
———. Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses & Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules. New York: Harper Collins, 2011.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.
Havrilesky, Heather. “A Joyful Kabuki Mask to Obscure the Anguish of Marital Bliss Gone Sour.” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 10, 2011.
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