Dramas That Mirror Our Lives

Say what you will about well-written murder mysteries and suspenseful thrillers; for truly excruciating tension, there’s nothing like watching a relationship unravel.

Icy silences. Seething resentments. Broken promises. Public slights. These keep me on the edge of my seat in theaters or turning the pages of books. For pure stress, wondering whodunit simply can’t compare to worrying about the husband-wife, father-son or mother-daughter relationship that’s disintegrating in front of me.

Recently, I watched two well-crafted films in which the relationships slowly fray and twist in the chill wind of familiarity and contempt. “Lantana” takes its name from a flowering bush armed with treacherously tangled and thorny branches. Set in Sydney, Australia, the film tells the stories of four couples as wounding and intertwined as the plant.

Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) is trying to rekindle the passion in her marriage to Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), a policeman in midlife crisis, by forcing him to take dance lessons.

But Leon is having an affair with a woman who has recently left her husband. Valerie (Barbara Hershey) is Sonja’s therapist, whose own marriage to John (Geoffrey Rush) is crumbling in the aftermath of their daughter’s death. John simmers with hurt, unable to reconcile his wife’s method of dealing with grief with his own.

Almost no one in this movie seems able to connect with his or her spouse until the end--and for at least one couple, that’s too late.

“In the Bedroom” is just as painful. Grief is the disease that threatens to overcome a marriage between the middle-class New England husband and wife after a tragedy that involves their 21-year-old son.

The film unfolds slowly, following Ruth (Sissy Spacek) and Matt (Tom Wilkinson) day by day--to the choral lessons Ruth teaches, to Matt’s medical office, to the store and to bed, as life grinds on. Each day is filled with stony silences and miscues until, finally, husband and wife turn on each other.

They ultimately come to a resolution of sorts, but one that never will console them. By the end of the movie, I was exhausted, wrung out by their pain and inability to comfort each other.

These are rich, saddening and believable tales because they mimic parts of our own complex and inevitably imperfect relationships. These are our dreams and nightmares, our days and nights, our spouses and parents and children. And these reflections of ourselves make for the most powerful narratives--and sometimes the most agonizing.

Tales such as these “are such a Rorschach for your own life,” says Charlotte Stoudt, dramaturge at Baltimore’s Center Stage. “You have to ask yourself what it is in your own life that makes this so agonizing. ‘Why am I afraid of this in my own life?’”

More than 50 years after Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman,” the play, in which Willy Loman continually betrays his wife and disillusions his sons, still has enormous resonance. In the 1999 Tony Award-winning revival, actors Brian Dennehy and Elizabeth Franz portrayed the relationship between salesman and wife in particularly torturous fashion. “I never want to be alone in the room with that play again,” Stoudt says.

It’s the ring of truth that elevates a play or book or film to the level of great art. And it’s that same truth that can make some works nearly unbearable. Little wonder that I can watch Arnold Schwarzenegger take out a slew of bad guys without flinching; I’m not emotionally engaged. But I cringe during such movies as “Affliction,” which stars James Coburn as a violent father and Nick Nolte as a son who is just like him.

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However painful, the battles, feuds and silences among those who profess to love one another are endlessly fascinating. The themes are the same, but the nuances can be infinite. It is as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in the first line of “Anna Karenina”: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Conflict is the essence of plot, and conflict within the family cuts close to the bone for all of us,” says Sister Kathleen Feeley, former president of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, who teaches 20th century American literature. Think Cain and Abel. Macbeth. Ulysses.

“Cain killed Abel, and the story is like a prototype for all the ages,” Feeley says. “From the beginning of time--before business relationships, before outside friendships--familial relationships have been with us. Our lives have been shadowed by myth, and these myths often have conflicts stemming from familial relationships.”

Gut-wrenching. Heartbreaking. What more can I ask of a story? Happiness, perhaps. But without the emotions, soul-searching and angst that come with conflicts between people, these stories wouldn’t be recognizable as life. As Feeley says: “I can’t think of any novel that is about a happy family except Dick and Jane.”

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Holly Selby writes for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.