In 2002, Far from Heaven, written and directed by Todd Haynes, caused a brief stir among critics who appreciated his aspirations to emulate Douglas Sirk, the genius of the 1950s filmed critique of America. Far from Heaven told the story of a couple living in Hartford, Connecticut, who undergo a severe marital crisis: he’s gay and she falls in love with a black man. Well played by Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore, and set in a Sirkian universe of heightened color and emotion, the movie inspired no imitations and could not really reach Sirk’s level of honesty and informed sympathy. It did, however, bring the issues of homosexuality and racism out of the category of implied subtext.
After the millennium, throughout the following decade, pundits turned seriously toward the subject of marriage. The topic was evidently no longer a familiar old shoe but was suddenly new, a distanced concept worthy of intense scrutiny, possibly fueled by alienated times. Marriage became zeitgeist. These look-sees were the over-the-top sort of article that once appeared in marriage manuals or women’s magazines, the let’s-pull-up-our-socks-and-get-the-job-done approach. The new articles had statistics. Polls had been conducted. Testimonies were taken. Where once we had only been reminded of what we already knew, with a little reassurance thrown in, now we were being lectured, educated, informed. Carl Weisman, author of Serious Doubts: Why People Marry When They Know It Won’t Last, said that people look at marriage as a way to solve a problem and then were inevitably disappointed. (He conducted a poll in which 79 percent of the people he queried indicated they felt it had been a mistake to marry their partner.) Parade magazine also conducted a poll to determine the major cause of problems in marriage. (The answer had long been available in the movies: money.) Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History, told an interviewer that “barely half of all adults in the United States are married.” She added that “the median age at the time of a first marriage has never been higher, slightly more than 26 years old for women and almost 29 for men.” She backed up her remarks with census-report statistics. In 1960, 72 percent of all adults over the age of eighteen were married; in 2000, only 57 percent were. In the year 2011, that number had already decreased to 51 percent, which meant that in 1960 three out of every five adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were married, but in 2011 only one in five were. Coontz drew a conclusion: “I think marriage is perceived as a very desirable good but no longer as a necessity.” (Robert Thompson, an oft-quoted professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, disagrees. He says, “I think most Americans still love the idea that they will meet their soul mate and go into death together. I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point where people have completely gotten so cynical about the notion of finding someone they can be happy with for the rest of their lives.”)
Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, called the people who married in the 1970s “the greatest divorcing generation.” Researchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project defined generosity as a good source of happiness in marriage: “the virtue of giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly” was advocated, and suggestions were such things as simply making them coffee in the morning. (Gone was the movie dream of Gable putting a diamond bracelet in Loy’s morning kippers.) Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Elizabeth Weil detailed evidence for her “I Have a Pretty Good Marriage” testimony. Lying in bed at night, she had begun to wonder “why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse.” (She had been viewing her marriage “like the waves on the ocean.”) Her written version of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage provides details on the day-to-day of the project she and her husband, already happy enough, undertook to become more happy. Promising to have the courage and patience to grow, she concluded with what might be a cautionary note: “Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage—the reason so few of us do it—stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal.” (She feels it’s wish fulfillment, and every word she says could be a solid basis for a marriage movie screenplay from the past.)
Dan Savage, a sex-advice columnist, says we need to get over our American obsession with strict fidelity, because it gives people unrealistic expectations. Writing for The Stranger, an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, Savage thinks, “Monogamy is not natural, non-monogamy is not natural, variation is what’s natural … people need the thrill that comes from the illicit rather than the predictable.” Tara Parker-Pope, author of The Happy Marriage Is the “Me” Marriage, says, “For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.”
Filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro set out to interview a list of people he knew under the age of forty who were divorced, and ask them what happened. His Chekovian/Tolstoyan conclusion was, “All happy couples are the same, which is to say they are just boring.” (The movies had long since understood this, which was why movie couples always had to mess things up: to become more interesting and thus more watchable.) In fact, when Shapiro presented descriptions of some of his interviewees, he handily labeled them as character types: The Adulteress. The Young Wife. The Two-Time Ex.
The Adulteress says when she first set eyes on her lover across the room at a party: “We were like magnets. I could have avoided it and probably should have, but I was weak, self-indulgent, disrespectful, and impulsive.” Was she Greta Garbo in The Painted Veil or Anna Karenina?
The Young Wife says, “I thought he [her husband] was hot … but he began spending more and more of his time playing video games and watching television. I felt lonely.” Was she Kim Novak in Strangers When We Meet?
The Two-Time Ex gets right to the nitty-gritty. “Halfway through any divorce the only thing you can think of is this: I hate this person, and I want this person to bleed.” Was she Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses?
Offscreen, marriage, once an inevitable social union for most people, had become a grab bag of movie plots, recycled as deep thinking. A kind of Reality Marriage Show.
Surveying the scene in early 2011, it’s clear that marriage, no matter what, will always be a subject for comedies (see 2010’s It’s Complicated and 2011’s Newlyweds—and 2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, in which a couple splits up but can’t bring themselves to let go and move on). It’s familiar, it’s always there, and it’s tragic—three prerequisites for a good belly laugh. The subject is now largely treated by independent films seeking to give it intellectual credibility, literary cachet, or social relevance. Ironically, this hasn’t brought it any great difference.21
Looking at four independent films that have been taken seriously in very recent years, it might be said that one can see something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue—in other words, nothing we haven’t heard or seen before. During the decade of 2000–2010, a number of dreary marital movies that offered no hope appeared, such as Revolutionary Road (2008) and Blue Valentine (2010). Marriage becomes a subject for high drama and deep-dish thinking. Everybody was doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Suddenly marriage itself becomes the equivalent to crushing poverty during the Depression or drug addiction in the 1950s. It’s hopeless, it’s unfair, and it’s a situation that can’t sustain you, and that you can’t sustain.
Revolutionary Road (something old) was based on an excellent novel by Richard Yates, but the film couldn’t re-create the book’s mournful tenderness or its tragic sense of loss. The movie was yet another presentation of the suburban world as a hopeless trap for clueless people who had wanted more out of life than marriage. The visual presentation of the ’burbs as the social wasteland of marital bliss had already been worked over for several decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s. There had been The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and No Down Payment (dramatic version
s), Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys (the comic version), The Stepford Wives (1975, the horror version, remade in 2004), Bye Bye Birdie (1963, the musical version) and The ’burbs (1989, the inexplicable version), and more. Revolutionary Road was tired, and died a quiet death at the box office.
The married couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, act out the definitive modern marriage disaster: Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Photo Credit 3.14)
Blue Valentine (something blue), like many marriage movies, is told out of chronological order. This mode of storytelling has become extremely popular in the past two decades, perhaps fueled by filmmakers who watched Citizen Kane just once too often in college film classes.22 The conceit of telling a marriage story out of sequence keeps a constant reminder in front of viewers about the pitfalls of monogamy. Critics loved Blue Valentine’s use of the form, in particular praising the scene from the couple’s past in which they share a moment of musical improvisation, which tells audiences, or means to tell audiences, that they are emotionally right for each other. As Ryan Gosling strums a ukulele, Michelle Williams executes a lumbering tap dance to “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” There’s something contrived about the moment, a look-at-our-sweet-little-romance phoniness that illustrates the modern marriage movie’s inability to really believe in such things. One has only to compare a similar scene from an old movie to note the difference. In It Should Happen to You (1954), Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon are courting, and sitting around a neighborhood restaurant/bar where there’s a piano. As he plays and they both sing “Let’s Fall in Love,” they also carry on an easy, natural conversation. The wedding of music, lyrics, piano, laughter, and natural dialogue, played by two incredible pros, masters of both comedy and tragedy, presents an audience with an honest look at a couple who are totally in sync and, as it were, made for each other. There are other examples. Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed walk home together in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) improvising “Buffalo Gals,” and Jean Harlow and Robert Williams make up their own lyrics in Platinum Blonde (1931). All of these films have authenticity. Gosling and Williams are talented, but their little song and dance is a self-conscious version of the earlier naturalistic ideas. It’s postmodern—and unreal, like the marriage they inhabit. Married six years, he’s a freelance house painter and she’s an ambitious nurse, and the film is yet another that asks the question “What happened to us?”—but the audience is the first to wonder.
New forms of marriage finally arrive onscreen: a happy, same-sex couple only temporarily derailed: Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right. (Photo Credit 3.15)
In 2011, one of the ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar (along with Blue Valentine) was allegedly something new: a different take on the marriage film. The Kids Are All Right presented a story in which two lesbian mothers have each borne a child by the same sperm donor. The two children, a son and a daughter, are now teenagers who search out their father and bring him home. One of the lesbian moms then has an affair with him, the other finds out, and the kids are no longer all right. The couple (lesbians) and the children (sperm donations) seem to be very new indeed, but the movie plot might easily have been concocted in 1935. It would have starred Kay Francis and George Brent as a happy couple with two adopted children (maybe Jackie Cooper and Bonita Granville) who decide to locate their birth mother (Gloria Stuart), who would then have an affair with old dad. The sexuality and the science give a “now” flip to what is essentially a set of marriage-plot issues from the past. In the endings of both films, the couples would be reunited around the importance of love and family life—even if The Kids Are All Right does it by having Annette Bening slam the door in the face of the sperm donor, yelling, “Get your own family.”23
Unfaithful (2002) is something borrowed—from the French. It’s a remake of Claude Chabrol’s fabulous 1969 thriller La Femme Infidèle—a story of American adultery glacéed with French morality, ennui, and existential suspension of action. By 2002, it’s time for the marriage movie to become an over-the-top, R-rated sexual experience, as indeed Unfaithful is. Nevertheless, the very first image of the movie is the traditional one of a fantastic white rambling colonial home set down a country lane—the dream setting of American movie marriages. What plays out later will be very European. For no real reason other than an accidental meeting, housewife Diane Lane, married to an adoring Richard Gere, begins an affair with—of course—a Frenchman (Olivier Martinez). She has met him very cute in an unseasonably high wind that’s turned the streets of SoHo into a storm of flying papers, garbage-can lids, and debris. The couple simply bump into each other—a literal whirlwind courtship. The main emphasis of the movie is on their very steamy love scenes, stopping at very little where the censors are concerned.
There is almost no other action. Gere, a very sensitive man, quietly knows at once that something is strange about his wife, and he hires a detective to follow her. Once he learns the truth, he visits the lover, and after feeling slightly sick to his stomach and looking weak and beaten down, suddenly up and smashes the hapless Frenchman on the head with a snow globe, killing him very dead. (The snow globe is what set Gere off. He and his wife collect them, and she has unforgivably presented one of their best ones to her lover as a gift. Spotting it beside their love bed, Gere is pushed over the brink.) The difference between this story of infidelity and earlier forms is that there’s no real solution, no real forgiveness, no real sense of reconciliation, and certainly no future in it. Although the couple survive the police inquiries that inevitably occur, and reunite around their small son, they are trapped in an emotional limbo. They both have figured out what has happened. “What did you do? Did you hurt him? Tell me what you did,” she demands. “No!” is his angry reply. “Tell me what you did.” After they continue living as best they can, he says he will turn himself in, but she says not to: “No one will know.” “We’ll know,” he reminds her. For one brief moment of release, Lane imagines the day she met Martinez. As he turns to her at the top of his steps, inviting her up to collect herself and tend to the knee she hurt in their collision, she smiles, says no, hails a cab, and drives away.
The modern adultery movie put the sex onscreen in new, steamier ways than the old films, but the results were the same: disaster. Diane Lane and Richard Gere play a married couple, but Lane threatens what they have when she starts a hot affair in Unfaithful. (Photo Credit 3.16)
Driving home from the school auction, where Gere and Lane have happily interacted with friends, mingled socially, and she has danced with their son, they are tense and desperate in their car at a red light just in range of the police station. Their little boy is asleep in the backseat. They talk. Could they sell everything, go away, and live on the beach in Mexico? They lean toward each other, embrace, and kiss. It is late at night and there is no traffic. A cut takes viewers outside the car, to a position far behind them. As the light changes to green, the car does not move. And it never moves. As the credits roll, the car just sits there in its position of suspension between right and wrong, marriage and divorce, prison and Mexico. Two people who’ve been wed for eleven years, and have known each other intimately, have learned that what they know about each other is only part of what there is to know. Who is he? Who is she? Who am I? What should we do? (As George Sanders says to his wife, Ingrid Bergman, in Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 examination of marriage, Voyage in Italy, “Now that we’re strangers, we can start all over again.”) Unfaithful’s unresolved ending, borrowed from Chabrol, is indicative of where the marriage movie is headed: toward no resolution, no closure, no reassurance, and finally, no explanation. The denial of closure is a serious violation of earlier movie marriage stories, and it can be seen as emerging as a major change in all these films, Revolutionary Road, Blue Valentine, The Kids Are All Right, and Unfaithful. The movie business is beginning to accept that marriage is a story that somehow can’t really be told. (They will, of course, try to tell it anyway.)
Is it b
rother-to-brother, an affair, an after-work confrontation, an accidental meeting? Whatever it is, it’s two men, but it’s also exactly like a marriage, in J. Edgar, with Armie Hammer and Leonardo DiCaprio in the biopic about Clyde Tolson and J. Edgar Hoover. (Photo Credit 3.17)
In late 2011, Clint Eastwood released a biopic called J. Edgar, the story of the man who built the FBI into a powerful political force in the United States. J. Edgar Hoover never married. His office was his home, and his home was his office. Yet contained within this film is one of the best portraits of a married relationship that has been seen in the motion picture. Hoover and his co-worker, Clyde Tolson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer, have a lifelong friend/companion/whatever relationship. It is a commitment between two men who are friends, colleagues, companions, and maybe lovers. (The film lets an audience decide.) Hoover and Tolson work together, play together, listen to each other, disagree and fight with each other, share joy and tragedy and challenge, and never lose their basic commitment from youth to old age. They are seen side by side at work, at the race track, at social events. They have their problems (they are both men, unable to wed or live openly as a gay couple, if you assume they’re gay) and they have their frustrations (they function on different levels of self-awareness about their feelings). However, what an audience watches is a love story that deepens into marriage.
There are, in particular, three scenes of “married” domesticity. In one, they are in silken robes, sharing an “after party” gossip session, with champagne and delicacies, laughing happily and mocking their fellow guests. Married couples do this, and although the scene ends in a fistfight with an enforced kiss, it has the honesty of a marital end-of-the-day chitchat. In the second scene, they are in the kitchen after Tolson has had a stroke. Hoover is preparing breakfast, talking to Tolson with forceful optimism, cheering him up and urging him onward to recovery. Hoover speaks words his own mother used to keep him going forward in life. There is real pain and confusion in Tolson’s eyes as he listens, and a grim determination to will his partner back to health in Hoover’s as he fixes Tolson’s eggs. The “I will give you strength” energy that flows between them is marital. In the third scene, just before Hoover dies, the two men speak obliquely about their feelings, remembering how and when they met. J. Edgar says the most he ever has to say in the film about his love for Clyde, touching him tenderly, but briefly, on the hand and shoulder. On the first day Tolson came to Hoover’s office, he says, “You gave me a handkerchief.” Quietly, Tolson again hands him one.
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