Call It ‘Married ... With Cameras’

Much of TV habitually reduces matrimony to sitcom laughs or hollow, soulless rolls of the dice. Note this month’s “Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska” on Fox, and sleek spouse hunters invading the ritzy Hamptons on ABC.

But now comes Michael Apted’s “Married in America” on A&E;, profiling nine diverse couples in the New York area, Los Angeles and Birmingham, Ala., and charting their routes to the altar.

It’s so good you’ll throw rice.

British-bred Apted is not only an accomplished director of feature films spanning “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and this year’s “Enigma.” He also makes important documentaries like this captivating two-parter. It’s created in the fashion of his celebrated “7 Up” films, whose original 14 British school children have been revisited by his cameras at seven-year intervals since 1963. As a long-range documentary project--monitoring these twisting lives well into middle age--this earlier signature work deserves its own pedestal.

There’s something especially poignant about keeping a balance sheet on the callow youngsters of “7 Up” and watching their innocence fray, then years later measuring their achievements against the compromises they’ve made. “Married in America” has much the same promise, with Apted planning four additional films about these couples in this decade. Even if some should split, he’ll continue following the participants as individuals.

It doesn’t hurt that everyone here is likable, and that you really want these marriages to flourish.

There are no Rick Rockwells and Darva Congers, sniffing out America’s taste for vulgarity by playing nookie for dollars. Nor anyone playing the “The Dating Game” with a bang. What strikes you most, in fact, is the apparent sincerity of these soon-to-marry duos and how uncowed by the camera they seem while responding to the unseen Apted’s questions in cultured Britspeak.

He asks them pointedly to expose the full panorama of their lives, from sex to careers to parents. He wants to know their hopes and aspirations as couples in a fluid era when marriage parameters are being redrawn in some circles, and the institution itself redefined. He also asks what problems they envision for themselves and their mates, and how they plan to resolve them.

Although we’ll discover more every two years, it may take the full decade to learn if these couples symbolize U.S. marriage in the early 21st century. If that is even a realistic goal for the film.

“All I want people to do is connect with it,” Apted said in Los Angeles. “It’s so tempting to try to project on it, but I don’t want people to come away with generalizations.”

Here’s one, though. Helped by producers Steven Lawrence and Dale Riehl and others, Apted is as good a storyteller here as in the best of his feature films, benefiting from interesting couples pared from an original list of more than 100 who submitted video interviews.

Especially striking are the film’s intersecting cultures and religious faiths.

In New York, Chris, 25, a white cop with red hair, is marrying Vanessa, 24, whose mother is a Colombian emigre.

Betty, 26, is white. Her mother is fine with her engagement to her childhood sweetheart, Reggie, 27. But he says his Haitian American mom initially “would have rather seen me unhappy with a Haitian woman than [happy] with anyone else.”

Instead of marrying the “nice Jewish girl” his parents anticipated, Neal, a 31-year-old medical student, is engaged to Cheryl, 33, a second-generation Filipino and Catholic who is supporting them while he preps for future wealth. Although Neal’s mother now calls Cheryl “a love,” her future daughter-in-law sounds unpersuaded. “Your mom said, ‘Don’t get too excited, she’s not Jewish,’ ” she reminds Neal in Apted’s presence. “What am I supposed to say about that?”

What will viewers say about Toni and Kelly, both in their 30s and living together in a New Jersey suburb, yet destined to speak their vows in Vermont, the only state recognizing same-sex marriages? Both are committed to becoming biological mothers through artificial insemination.

They were an intriguing choice for the film, only because they are mannishly earthy instead of the feminine, cosmopolitan lesbians that Apted might have chosen.

“I wanted to keep away from that elegant, metropolitan gay circuit,” he said, “because this is about ordinary people. I love the fact that they’re from New Jersey.”

The “most marginal” of the couples, Apted acknowledges, is Chuck and Carol, recovering alcoholics and former drug users whose lives have been oozing craters of misery.

Also the most absorbing.

Chuck, 35, has been married three times. Just two husbands for Carol, a towering 37-year-old grandmother who wears curved Dragon Lady nails and stands a head taller than her beefy fiance. They met years ago as children in the San Fernando Valley and now have scraped together $5,000 for their biker’s nuptials.

Apted said he was determined to include someone “people would recoil from.” That’s Chuck, a bruiser who spent four years in prison for raping a woman he’d earlier slept with, and another term for failing to register as a sex offender.

A&E;’s Web site is getting heat from those opposed to Chuck’s inclusion in “Married in America,” Apted said. As he notes, however, Chuck and Carol are both articulate, acknowledge their mistakes and appear earnest about marriage giving them a new start.

The camera captures their vows. The groom is emotional. And there’s something dignified and regal about the bride, even as her tattoos show through the netting of her long white dress. Then off they go on the Harley, her wedding train flowing behind them like a streamer.

You can’t help thinking they’re riding uphill. Chuck says he’s “never been faithful” as a husband. Is it too late to change? In fact, how will all these couples cope with the challenges they surely will face?

In two years, we’ll talk.

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“Marriage in America” can be seen at 9 tonight on A&E.; The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).