After a big AFI Fest premiere, “By The Sea,” Angelina Jolie’s third directorial outing, opens in theaters tomorrow. The film marks something of a departure for the megastar-turned-helmer: as opposed to the prestige-y conflict dramas of “In The Land Of Blood And Honey” and last year’s “Unbroken,” the new film is a European-style melodrama set in the 1970s about a troubled American couple on vacation whose relationship is put to the test in a major way.
It’s a throwback to a particular kind of movie made by Italian directors of the 1950s and 1960s, but also filmed by others before and since, which examine a marriage or relationship in crisis, the hope that can come from surviving those tests and the sadness when you realize you won’t make it. How successful Jolie has been in capturing the spirit of those movies is debatable (read our review to find out how), but it certainly fits into a long, fine tradition, and with her film arriving imminently, it seemed like a good time to look back across the history of the relationship-in-crisis sub-genre. Take a look below and let us know your favorites in the comments.
“All That Heaven Allows” (1955)
One of Douglas Sirk’s very best films, “All That Heaven Allows” tells the story of Cary (Jane Wyman), an affluent New England widow who falls in love with her younger, lower-class gardener Ron (Rock Hudson). Of course, their romance upsets the local community, and even Cary’s children reject her newfound happiness as unnatural, causing her to break it off, though after he has an accident, she rethinks her decision and decides that she was too hasty. Later homaged by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (with “Ali: Fear Eats The Soul”) and Todd Haynes (with “Far From Heaven”), both of whom cannily brought race into the mix, here the concerns are more class-conscious, and the film both perfectly captures the life of 1950s suburbia (the heightened, almost artificial nature of Sirk’s locations play up the artificial construct of that world), and skewers the hypocrisy and phoniness of the world around them —the way that Cary’s children are portrayed is almost staggering in its lack of sympathy. As ever with Sirk’s work, Iit’s gorgeously shot, and beautifully performed, with Wyman, never a huge star despite an Oscar win for “Johnny Belinda” seven years earlier, expressive and highly layered, and Hudson perfectly cast even when you overlook the overtones that subsequent revelations about his personal life added. The ending might seem a little too happy for a story with such an air of tragedy, but Sirk and his actors never let us forget what they’ve sacrificed or the difficulties that likely lie ahead.
“Blue Valentine” (2010)
Derek Cianfrance’s harrowing “Blue Valentine” isn’t so much a movie about a relationship in crisis as it is about a marriage in freefall, and just exactly how two essentially good-hearted, well-intentioned young people managed to sink so low into an abysmal pit of mental and emotional abuse. The film is as rough and unsparing in its depiction of human error as anything from the golden era of John Cassavetes, and features two career-best turns from beautiful actors who mine some very ugly parts of themselves here. Michelle Williams plays Cindy, a level-headed young woman who is in the process of caring for her sick father when she meets Dean (a pre-Meme Ryan Gosling, smoldering with the intensity of a young Paul Newman), a shiftless charmer whose devil-may-care attitude is more damaging in the long term than either of them could begin to imagine. The film’s fragmented chronology exposes a tempestuous tussle with memory, juxtaposing Dean and Cindy at their swooning highs as well as their stomach churning lows. And boy, are the lows low: who can forget the skin-crawling motel scene, or Dean’s nerve-shredding third act freakout in a hospital where he punches a doctor? But Cianfrance, through obviously drawn to melodramatic narratives, is no miserabilist: he’s careful to show just how these two came to fall for each other in the first place (aside from the gorgeously moody score from indie rock outfit Grizzly Bear, “Blue Valentine” also turns Penny & the Quarter’s chipper “You and Me” into a tender romantic declaration, as well as a cry for help). Cianfrance would try his hand at the family epic with his follow-up “A Place Beyond the Pines,” with significantly less successful results. But “Blue Valentine” is one of the most unflinching looks at heartbreak ever filmed.
“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (1969)
Paul Mazursky’s wonderful first film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” is unique for its dissection of a certain kind of socially manufactured politeness that is endemic amongst the well read and sexually adventurous of mid-century Los Angeles. The film is about two Beverly Hills bohemian couples who, in the aftermath of one man’s confession to infidelity, declare that they shall tell the truth, the ugly, honest truth, at all costs —in the parlance of Mazursky and co-writer Larry Tucker’s screenplay, they will say what they “feel,” as opposed to what they think. The idea, illustrated by a hilariously ill-advised trip to a self-help seminar in the film’s opening scenes, is that this unabashed honesty will create real progress in both of the film’s respective romantic courtships. These people are so committed to unvarnished truth telling and allegedly progressive thinking that they’ve forgotten how to be human with each other. They deliberately speak in patronizing platitudes, extolling the virtues of people whom they barely know —they’re so open that they’re about ready to fall apart. “Bob & Carol” remains Mazursky’s definitive movie because of its shocking, funny and deeply serious dissection of a collective cultural mentality. It’s about the big differences between what people do and what people say, in a way that is exclusive to the city Mazursky portrayed so fondly and so well. Unlike the nebbishy Upper East Side-dwellers of Woody Allen, who remain largely fixated largely on class envy, creative hierarchies and sexual hang-ups, Mazursky’s unwound Angelinos fancy themselves on the brink of a wave of tolerance and progress. They’re perfect, upstanding, morally sound citizens of the world, and they’re also perfect clowns. When the four come to the conclusion that the only logical “next step” in their self-imposed spiritual cleansing is to all sleep together, Elliot Gould’s character casually remarks, “first, we’ll have an orgy. Then we’ll go see Tony Bennett.”
“Brief Encounter” (1945)
He’s perhaps better known now for his grand epics like “Bridge Over The River Kwai,” “Lawrence Of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago,” but one of the best films of David Lean’s career was an earlier, much smaller picture: a gorgeous, heart-rending romance that numbers among cinema’s best. Based on Noel Coward’s play “Still Life,” the film sees a middle-class suburban wife Laura (Celia Johnson) relate the story of how a piece of grit in her eye led her to meet charming doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) while waiting at a railway station tea shop. Both are married with children, but find themselves meeting regularly, eventually in secret, getting ever close to taking a step that might not be undoable. It’s very much a classically British love story, one where what goes unsaid is more important than what is said and where the brief moments where emotional repression slips into a burst of sudden feeling. And while the film remains chaste, and we’re even deprived of a passionate goodbye thanks to the intervention of an oblivious chatterbox (one of the most heartbreaking scenes in cinema history), it somehow works in its favor, turning it into not just a swooning love story, but also two people whose marriages are being put to the harshest tests. It might celebrate a set of values that seem a little old-fashioned now, but it still feels as fresh as the day it was released: just look at its obvious influence on a more recent great romance, Todd Haynes’ “Carol.”
“Early Spring” (1956)
If most know any film by Yasujirõ Ozu, it’s “Tokyo Story,” a movie frequently named among the best ever made and an indisputable quiet masterpiece. The film that followed after a three gap (almost unprecedented for a hugely prolific filmmaker —he’d been helping actress Kinuyo Tanaka on her second film as a director) saw something of a departure from his usual family stories, but proves to be just as powerful. “Early Spring” stars Ryõ Ikebe as a salaryman in a Tokyo brick company who begins an affair with a colleague (Keiko Kishi), with his wife (Chikage Awashima swiftly coming to suspect that something is wrong. Abandoning his usual themes of the difference between generations and family politics (at the behest of his studio, who felt that they’d gone out of fashion and wanted him to cast younger actors), Ozu nevertheless tells an atypical story in his career with his usual understated, delicate style, skipping over what lesser filmmakers would consider key scenes and letting the audience fill in the blanks (or keep guessing as to whether they took place at all). And as ever, life bursts in from outside the frame: this isn’t so much a story as it is a slice of reality. Ozu’s usual nuance and fine eye for human nature means that both the affair and the eventual reunion of the married couple feel authentic and utterly earned, but it also serves beautifully as a portrait of the 1950s salaryman, feeling like a precursor to, among others, Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment.”
