Marriage in Movies: Untold Story

Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Girl dies of incurable disease, vanishes in natural disaster, is unjustly accused and sentenced to death, decides not to ditch boring but decent hubby, whatever. As formulas go, the doomed love story has been a sturdy one. Although the frustrating reasons why the lover and the beloved cannot be together vary, the point is that we, the audience sniveling and wringing out our soggy hankies in the darkened movie theater, are supposed to celebrate the perfect love that cannot be.

The genre includes such memorable films as “Brief Encounter” and “Love Story,” as well as more recent examples, “Sommersby,” “Dying Young,” “Message in a Bottle,” “The Horse Whisperer” and that dreamy exercise in soft-core porn for middle-aged women, “The Bridges of Madison County.” With apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, all these movies could share the same description: The candle of their love burned briefly. But while it flickered, oh, what a lovely light. Oh, what a load of romantic hogwash.

Of course Hollywood is in the romantic hogwash business, and we love them for it. If we wanted reality, we’d look in the mirror or across the dinner table. But even when filmmakers think they’re delivering a realistic love story, or, worse, promise to portray one, they fail. The latest example, the hideously wrongheaded “The Story of Us,” is another movie that reminds us how the mysteries of long-term relationships elude filmmakers.

The ultimate doomed love story, “The Bridges of Madison County,” chronicled a four-day encounter between a man (restless, horny) and a woman (lonely, bored, restless, horny). We are to understand that He and She are soul mates. What an attractive proposition, playing soul mate for a steamy four days. That probably wouldn’t be much of a strain, with any number of people.

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But show us 15 years--there’s a challenge. Perhaps “The Story of Us” wouldn’t have been such a disappointment if director Rob Reiner hadn’t anointed himself the champion of the prosaic. “We started talking about doing a movie about what it means to be married for a long period of time, the ins and outs, the difficulties of staying married,” he says on the film’s Web site. “There are movies about people getting divorced and the trauma of divorce, but you never see movies about all the stuff in between, the difficulties of what it is to have an ongoing, committed relationship.”

“The Story of Us” is cruelly defeated by its structure, flashbacks to different times in the 15-year marriage of Katie and Ben (Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis) that showcase an assortment of bad wigs, but little in the way of recognizable human behavior. We do see their love ascending up the near side of the marriage arc, approaching the high point of shared sexual nirvana, then teetering at the apex of communion when a child is born before sliding down the other side on the grease of resentment, disappointment and jealousy. But the couple’s checkered history is squeezed into a cheesy montage near the movie’s end. Had it been more leisurely and chronologically explored, their mid-marriage despair would have inspired feelings of loss, rather than the sense of relief that their separation engenders.

Reiner is right about one thing: We’ve seen a lot of divorce on screen. Ironically, great divorce movies like “Shoot the Moon” and “Kramer vs. Kramer,” which successfully convey the complex knot of love and pain that forms when a family disintegrates, have been more insightful about marriage than love stories. In fact, “The Story of Us” is a divorce movie, but one that lacks the courage to let its sorry twosome uncouple. It convincingly shows a man and a woman who are so miserable together that even their children would probably endorse a split.

It bears some resemblance to “Two for the Road,” the 1967 Stanley Donen comedy in which Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, both young, beautiful and preternaturally charming, fall in love, marry, bicker, cheat and almost go their separate ways. Both films reduce their characters to a few annoying traits, as if the world were divided into neat Felixes and messy Oscars who just can’t get along. In both, the protagonists presented are so unlovable--petty, selfish, whiny and demanding--that only the blinding appeal of the stars can make the idea of anyone ever falling for such people believable.

The reason why good marriages make bad movies could be as simple as the truism that drama feeds on conflict. Happy marriage equals no conflict equals boring. As Rhett Butler told Scarlett, there are two times when fortunes are made: when a civilization collapses, and when one begins. Struggle, anticipation, surprise and suspense all enrich the trove of moving divorce movies and engaging courtship sagas. Nora Ephron has made both: “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ and “Sleepless in Seattle” (courtship) and “Heartburn” (divorce). It stands to reason that I can’t get no satisfaction, sung either by the hopeful lover or the spouse beyond hope, has more narrative energy than stagnant bliss.

Television has known that for a long time, and used the initials UST to describe Unresolved Sexual Tension, that condition in which a man and a woman lust after each other, but don’t act on their attraction. Yet. The classic example was Diane and Sam in “Cheers,” for whom years of verbal sparring served as foreplay.

In season one of “Sports Night,” Casey and Dana continued a similar dance of flirtation, and although they’ve declared that they’ll get together soon, expect them to prolong their approach to consummation as long as possible, or at least until a sweeps period. Did Ling refuse to sleep with Richard Fish her first year on “Ally McBeal” because she’s a tease, or because the show wanted maximum UST? Part of the UST canon is that anything from scratching a sexual itch to walking down the aisle sounds the death knell to romance. “Moonlighting” and “Rhoda” were both casualties of sexual and romantic tension resolved.

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The small screen, and the sitcom format, also excelled at showing the minutiae of married life. “Roseanne” surfaced just when the dysfunctional family moved into the neighborhood where Ozzie and Harriet had set the squeaky-clean standard of perfection. Roseanne and Dan Conner fought, made up, made love and made a life together, never leaving any doubt in the viewer’s mind that they were mad about each other. “Mad About You” also reveled in life’s little absurdities. Unlike other comedies, its stated mission was to look at the aggravations and accommodations of a new marriage through a magnifying glass. No argument was too silly, no emotional tic too neurotic to examine, and they took seven years to do it.

The movies have done well by marriages with problems, particularly when the problem is not the marriage. In “Losing Isaiah,” “Deep End of the Ocean” and “Before and After” (films in which the wives are played by Jessica Lange, Pfeiffer and Meryl Streep, respectively), a marriage is background; a catastrophe with a child is center stage. In each story, the complexity of a long, flawed, yet deeply committed marriage is revealed as a couple goes through a crisis together.

They struggle over how to handle a situation, but the depth of their attachment is never in question, even as they disagree or test each other’s patience. These couples face real difficulties, such as the loss of a child or a son’s possible culpability in a murder. Relieved of the burden of being sexy, romantic or funny, they show how real marriages work.

Romantic comedies aren’t completely devoid of happily married couples. Yet they tend to lurk in a story’s periphery. When an ingenue is searching for Mr. Right, you can almost bet her older sister will lecture her on the wisdom of settling for Mr. Good Enough, just like she did. In “Obj1701016608ost loving pair are homosexual, and their obvious devotion gives ballast to the frenetic fumblings of their unattached friends, the movie’s stars.

Novels can similarly illuminate and instruct, but maybe it’s too much to ask of the movies to provide such illustrations of real life. Avoiding the kind of grandiose pronouncements others connected to “The Story of Us” were guilty of, Bruce Willis wisely told interviewer Diane Sawyer, “Please don’t look to this film for any clues about your life. It’s a piece of entertainment.”