The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 166 Days to go: 117
Movie #272: The Story of Us
As the movie starts (after a brief anecdote from Ben, played by Bruce Willis), the Jordan family is at the dinner table and they are doing High-Low, where each member of the family gives their high point of the day and their low point of the day. My son happened to be in the room at that moment and he looked over at me. “Hey, they’re doing High-Low,” he said. “Is that where you got it from?” It is indeed.
Where Revolutionary Road is the story of a marriage going bad that fails at every chance for redemption, The Story of Us is the story of a marriage going bad that actually gets saved. Ben and his wife Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer) are each at the ends of their ropes. Years of missed connections and petty resentments have brought them to the breaking point. They’ve tried all sorts of therapy and made concessions on account of their kids, but they just seem to drift further and further apart. So over the summer, while the kids are away at camp, they separate. It’s clear there’s still love and affection between them, but they can’t seem to find it, can’t seem to get past the regular arguments that never get closure and can’t stop experiencing their own pain long enough to see things from the other’s point of view. Despite missing each other and feeling at a loss, they can’t find a way through the fog.
But, somehow, Ben spends the summer writing about his grandparents’ marriage and has a few epiphanies about the nature of longstanding relationships. And Katie experiences how it’s both nice and weird and disconcerting to have someone else notice her. But instead of letting it pull her away from Ben, it pulls her closer to him. He’s the friend she misses. He’s the one who knows her. And she begins to understand and appreciate him in a whole new way. Out of the darkness, suddenly, they emerge. Sometimes it takes that crisis to realize what you want most out of life and who you most want to spend it with.
There are so many familiar notes in The Story of Us to anyone who has been married. Not to say that all marriages are in trouble, but that all marriages are hard and that sometimes the everyday events of your life get in the way. It’s easy for one person in the marriage to become the disciplinarian or the “responsible” one. It’s easy to fall into roles that feel natural and inadvertently take each other for granted. Getting out of those ruts takes a conscious effort from both partners. I like that The Story of Us recognizes and is representative of that.
The film is creatively structured, with Ben and Katie each narrating different parts of their history, and the hair and makeup team did a fabulous job differentiating the years gone by. Rob Reiner and Rita Wilson are sensational as Ben and Katie’s best friends Stan and Rachel, and the cameos given by Jayne Meadows and Tom Poston (as Katie’s parents) and Betty White and Red Buttons (as Ben’s parents) are fantastic. But what I love the most is how everything works together to build a complete life for this couple — their milestones and their memories, their highs and their lows.
Katie makes a pretty fantastic case at the end of the film, but the line I think about most is in the middle, when Ben says in voice over how no matter how bad things got, he always felt if he and Katie’s feet could find each other under the covers in bed at night, they were okay. I feel that way too. Even if I’m angry or disappointed or upset or sad or frustrated, I like my feet to get tangled up with my husband’s at night, like a silent affirmation of our connection and commitment, no matter what.
Of course, there are a lot of really funny lines as well. You don’t get this cast together and not wind up with a pretty funny movie. Rachel’s ruminations on the natures of the penis versus the vagina alone are worthy of a place in the monologue hall of fame. But the one I always want to shout in anger is, “And you can take that bread and shove it up the tops of your legs!”
As you do.
Viable Option 