Husbands and Wives (1992)
Make no mistake about it, marriage is difficult. It's a wonderful, complicated, messy, beautiful, frustrating ball of emotions that can strangle you one day and make you blissfully happy the very next. It is perhaps the most misunderstood institution to ever exist, and Hollywood is in no small part responsible for that - feeding gleefully into the 'happily ever after' syndrome that we all on some level aspire to, despite its absolute impossibility. No relationship, let alone a marriage, is ever a fairy tale, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Nothing can live up to that, though we nearly kill ourselves trying to prove exactly the opposite. Which is why a film like Husbands and Wives is such a welcome cinematic breather, something that those of us in the midst of the battle for happily ever after can watch and realize, heads nodding with knowing laughter, and proclaim, no longer alone: "Ah, exactly!"
"Did desire really grow with the years? Or did famililarity cause partners to long for other lovers? Was the notion of ever deepening romance a myth we had grown up on, along with simultaneous orgasm?"
Perhaps the best thing about Woody Allen's 1993 classic is its recognition of life and relationships as they actually are. True, at the time it was released Allen and co-star Mia Farrow were in embroiled in a rather nasty break-up that was anything but "normal", but the fact that the film itself, if not the stars' actual lives, seemed so accurately to depict the modern state of marriage ultimately means something. Whether we stay together or divorce, cling to each other or go our separate ways, this film has something to tell us, something to offer by way of proximity. And in the end, what else can great art really hope to do?
Judy: "Do you think it could ever happen to us?"
Gabe: "Well, I'm not planning on it, are you?"
Gabe and Judy Roth (Allen and Farrow) are a modestly happy married couple of ten years whose lives begin to unravel when their closest friends, Jack (Sydney Pollack) and Sally (Judy Davis), announce to them one night before dinner that they have decided to separate. They assure Gabe and Judy that this is a amicable decision they both have come to, that things simply weren't working out how they were and they felt the need to explore other options. This is hardly true in actuality, more of a facade than anything else, but it is still enough to shake Gabe and Judy's own relationship to the core. If their best friends could split up, how could they ever expect to stay together for the long haul?
Jack: "You just can't wipe out years of closeness...I mean you think you can...you don't see the roots, but boy, they're there."
Jack and Sally's decision to separate leads Gabe and Judy to some tough, emotional, almost heartbreaking conversations about their own relationship. In their room together late at night, getting ready for bed, they have the kind of conversations that most married couples must have from time to time - at least, those who talk to one another - the kind where you confess and backpedal, provoke and soothe, a crazy and numbing dance known so well by long-time lovers. You only hope they don't break you apart. That Allen chooses to shoot the film in a cinema-verite, fly-on-the-wall documentary approach, only adds to the odd sense of voyeurism that sets in as we watch Gabe and Judy discuss the innermost parts of their relationship. It's fascinating, but it almost seems like we have no business watching. After all, I wouldn't want them watching mine.
Judy: "All those memories, they're just memories...they're from years gone by and they're just isolated moments. They don't tell the whole story."
Meanwhile, Jack quickly takes up with another woman - a much younger, ditzier aerobics instructor that he quickly moves in with - while Sally slowly tests the waters of the dating pool, eventually jumping in with one of Judy's collegues. Their separation from each other allows them fleeting moments of relief that they mistake for happiness, but it's easy to see that they desperately still miss and need each other. As is so often the case with people who leave long relationships, they find themselves bumping up against all the same kinds of problems in their new relationship; for, ultimately, you take your baggage with you when you leave a relationship - it doesn't just magically disappear (though the first bursts of new love might often make it seem that way). Both miserable, but trying, they struggle on.
Sally: "Well, I've learned that love is not about passion and romance necessarily, it's also about companionship...it's like a buffer against loneliness."
Soon, Gabe begins to fall for one of his writing students (Juliette Lewis), and Judy begins to develop feelings for someone in her office (Liam Neeson), and gradually their relationship drifts apart in much the same way that their friends' had at the beginning of the film, the slow erosion of trust and the arguments over having children together ultimately breaking them apart. It's heartbreaking but, again, it's so very real. This is how relationships play out in each of our lives. While some of us manage to struggle through the tough times and keep things together, others feel they can only stand by and watch as the whole thing goes up in flames over the little things, over the bigger things.
Sally: "I think the true test of a relationship is how you weather a crisis, yes?"
Husbands and Wives is many things, but above all, it is honest. Make what you will of Woody Allen's own personal marital and domestic failings, the man knows how to hold up a mirror to all of our lives, our relationships, and show us the sad and funny truth about the way we choose to live. It's a rare thing in American cinema today to see marriage so deftly and expertly portrayed onscreen (though foreign directors like Ingmar Bergman have been doing it for years), that when it is we must be careful to embrace it. As far as I can tell, it's the only sensible antidote to happy ever after Hollywood romances that only serve to whet an appetite that life itself can never hope to fill.
Jack: "That stuff is really important, someone to grow old with...the thing that's so tough, that kills most people, is just unreal expectations."
Release Date: September 18, 1992
Domestic Total Gross: $10,555,619
Distributor: TriStar
Links
Judy Davis Online
"Sartrean themes in Husbands and Wives" (essay by Sander Lee)