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We decided to watch it last night, and were quickly engrossed in the story. It features a couple who have been married for fifteen years. Bruce Willis plays Ben, and Michelle Pfeiffer is his wife Katie. We see them initially sitting with their children, twelve-year-old Josh (Jake Sandvig) and ten-year-old Erin (Colleen Rennison).
Ben asks each of them what their high and low spots of the day were, evidently a game they play regularly. Then Erin points out that her parents’ anniversary is the following day and they agree that they’re going out for a meal. However when the children leave the room it’s clear that Ben and Katie really don’t care about spending time together. They barely acknowledge each other, except when pretending to the children that everything is fine.
We see them, a day or two later, driving the children to a bus to take them to a holiday camp - not a week or two, as I expected, but for two months. And then they drive home, where Katie is dropped off and Ben goes to stay in a hotel. Much of the film then follows them during the next couple of months as they get on with their separate lives (Ben is a writer, Katie compiles crosswords). There are regular flashbacks, sometimes showing times when they were deeply in love, but more often showing arguments or misunderstandings that turned into shouting matches.
It sounds rather depressing but there’s a lot of humour too, in part from their friends who share far too many intimate details from their own relationships. This, I assume is what gives the film its 15 rating, as well as some instances of ‘strong’ language. There’s no actual nudity other than one rear view which is amusing rather than intimate, and only one scene that would be considered ‘adult’ rated, but it’s interrupted before anything much transpires.
But there's also some humour from the couple's many visits to therapists, none of whom were particularly helpful. One of them does explain what he believes happens when a couple are in bed... and that leads to a very cleverly-done scene where six people, with perfect comic timing, are all talking at the same time.
The chemistry between the two principals is, we thought, excellent. When they are getting on, they do so very realistically. When they have rows, they’re perhaps predictable, neither giving way, both taking things personally. I wanted to stop them, to make them think about what they were saying and whether they really meant it… they were definitely getting under my skin. But at the same time I could see that, albeit caricatured, some of the arguments were all too believable.
We see, too, the way that their relationship started to show rifts when Katie was trying to deal with cooking, laundry, and two small children. Ben is a good father, but doesn’t realise just how hard Katie was working or how difficult it was for her. Katie feels restrained; when they met, they were both fun-loving creative people, but while Ben has retained his spontaneity and enjoyment of life, she has felt as if she had to impose some structure and discipline in their lives, in order to get anything done. And this has become another thing that they fight about.
There’s not a whole lot of direct plot; it’s situational and character-based rather than having much story. But the pace is good, the humour understated but just enough to lighten what could have been quite stressful. There’s an interlude in Venice which draws Ben and Katie together, not because of the romance of the place but because of a truly ghastly (albeit caricatured) couple, also from the United States, who they keep bumping into…
I had no idea where the relationship was going to go; it isn’t until near the end that there is a resolution, after an impassioned (and brilliantly executed) monologue from Katie. I did find myself wondering why the children were happy to stay for so long in the car, after two entire months away from their parents… but only in passing.
I gather this film didn’t get a great response from initial reviewers or the public, perhaps because it doesn’t have much plot and there’s a lot of stressful arguing. But as the ‘making of’ extra said, it was trying to pinpoint why a marriage might go wrong, not because of infidelity or anything major; just through the stresses and strains of life.
We thought it quite thought-provoking, and overall liked it very much. We were both pleased about how it ended, too. I would recommend it for people who have been in relationships for some years; I don’t think it would appeal to anyone who is single, and might be rather disturbing for someone just embarking on a new relationship.
