Chapter 4
Married Love Stories
When love seems to have died in a marriage, it can sometimes set the stage for a whole new love story. While we usually consider marriages after the honeymoon stage to be un-romantic and unsexy, we long to be proved wrong about that. Which is what some of the best married love stories do.
A classic in this genre is Shirley Valentine (1989, Willy Russell adapting his play). When we meet Shirley (Pauline Collins), the 40-something English housewife is so demoralized that her primary relationship is with the wall in her kitchen, the only thing that will listen to her. Her husband Joe (Bernard Hill) is a blue collar worker, gruff and angry, demanding and unappreciative. When Shirley gets a chance to take a holiday in Greece, she jumps at it in spite of Joe’s forbidding it. Her dream is a simple one, to sit on a beach at a little table and drink a glass of wine, watching the sun set. Is that too much to ask? No!
She reclaims her dreams, her mind, her body, and her whole self. She has a brief love affair with a Greek café owner (Tom Conti) and over the course of a few weeks, she brings herself back from the dead. Back to life. The transformation is so complete that when hubby Joe arrives on the foreign beach on a mission to get his wife back, he walks right past the beautiful, tanned woman in sunglasses and straw hat, colorful dress, and sandals, sitting at a little café table on the beach, sipping a glass of wine, watching the sun set. He doesn’t even recognize her as he tips his hat to her, not realizing that this beauty is his own wife. That this marriage survives, on new terms of Shirley’s making, is a tribute to her largeness of spirit and heart. And to Joe’s willingness and ability to change himself as well. We are happy to have broken out of her kitchen walls along with her.
Another English film in which a wife rejuvenates herself, and by doing so brings her marriage back to life, is the delightful Enchanted April (1991, Peter Barnes adapting Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel). In 1928 London, Lottie (Josie Lawrence) is inspired by a small classified ad in the newspaper. A villa in Italy for rent for the month of April. She enlists three other English women to go with her and the four of them head off for a life-changing month. Lottie’s lifeless marriage to Mellersh (Alfred Molina) is itself rejuvenated when he unexpectedly joins his wife at the villa.
The surprising thing about both these films is that we are not rooting for the marriages. We are rooting for these women to break out and be free and able to fully be themselves, even if it means leaving their husbands. That the husbands, who seem pretty hapless, are able to make the leap and keep their wives, is a happy surprise we weren’t even hoping for. In order for the men to be worthy of these new women, the men, in middle-age, need to change as well. When they do so, it is inspiring.
Hope Springs (2012, written by Vanessa Taylor) stars Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a long-married couple for whom the marriage is dead in everything but a divorce document. They live at opposite ends of the house. The sex and romance gone. They barely speak to each other passing in the hall. No brushing shoulders. No eye contact. This movie is pretty flat through most of the first two acts, with a lot of sitting in a therapist’s office (with the always solid Steve Carell) and working on the relationship. This type of scene is hard to watch. Talking heads. Rehashing old stuff. Not wanting to look at each other much less talk or listen.
The miracle happens in Act Three if you have the patience to wait for it. It may require world champion heavyweight actors like Streep and Jones to pull this off, in addition to honest and brave writing by Vanessa Taylor, but this movie makes us believe that a relationship that has been dead for twenty years, kept out of the ground by life support, can turn around completely. That these two isolated, lonely, frustrated, angry, bitter, repulsed, and repelled people could actually fall back into sweet, happy, sexy, devoted, renewing-vows love? This little movie makes us believe that a miracle of this proportion is possible.
Sometimes a married love story is built around one partner having a secret life. In these stories either love is fading under constant pretense, or anger and resentment are building due to this kind of misunderstanding. In The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982, William Bast adapting Baroness Orczy’s novel), Marguerite (Jane Seymour) is disappointed after the wedding that Percy (Anthony Andrews), the dashing, brave man she thought she married, turns out to be a weak, foppish, silly fellow. She fantasizes about the heroic “Scarlet Pimpernel” who leads daring rescue missions from England into Revolution-torn France. Eventually, she discovers, of course, that the legendary hero is none other than her own husband.
A modern version of this story is True Lies (1994, James Cameron adapting a screenplay by Claude Ziti, Simon Michael, and Didier Kaminka) in which Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) thinks her husband Harry (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a boring computer salesman, when he is actually a James Bond type secret agent. When she is pulled into his world, her humdrum daily existence and dull marriage are catapulted into a scary, sexy, action-packed life.
Sometimes two people fall in love after they have married each other.
In the Outlander series (2014 on, from Diana Gabaldon’s novels), Claire (Catriona Balfe), an Englishwoman and World War II combat nurse, wanders into a circle of standing stones and is transported from 1945, 200 years back in time, to the Scotland of 1743. She has to marry a man she barely knows to save her own life. Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) is the big Scots bloke who marries her, and they continue to fall more and more in love as their marriage survives many trials and hardships. And books. And TV seasons.
It brings to mind another period Scottish story of married love, Rob Roy (1995, screenplay by Alan Sharp), where a marriage becomes stronger and more devoted in the face of war, rape, danger, violence, and separation. Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange made us believe.
Green Card (mentioned under Arranged Meets) is another marry first, fall in love after story. Brontë (Andie MacDowell) marries Frenchman Georges (Gérard Depardieu) so she can qualify for an elegant New York City townhouse with a historic greenhouse. She is a botany nut and this stuffy building does not allow singles. Georges marries her to get the titular green card. Under pressure from the Immigration Service, they have to study each other and be able to pass a test to prove that their marriage is legitimate, or Georges will be deported. In the process of getting to know all the intimate details about each other, they fall in love. Cute meet? “I do.” Obstacle? INS. Formidable. And they complete each other. She can identify obscure plants. He can choose a perfect eggplant and make it into a heavenly dish.
Sometimes it isn’t until after the honeymoon that a couple gets to know the real person under the tuxedo and wedding dress, after all that good behavior of the dating process. Barefoot in the Park (1967, written by Neil Simon) is an adorable First Big Fight comedy, enacted by the very young and beautiful Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.
Often in married love stories, the trouble begins from a couple taking each other for granted. Adam’s Rib (1949, screenplay by married couple Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin) has Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy playing a long-married couple of attorneys whose marriage comes under fire when they find themselves on opposite sides of the same case in court. A case in which a woman has shot her husband. Women’s equality issues fly as heatedly as the lawyers’ arguments. The end result is two people who, after the battles die, find common ground and respect each other more. The marriage is stronger and love burns with a new, brighter flame.
Sometimes married couples act as one entity. The Thin Man movies (1934–41, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich adapting the books by Dashiell Hammett) are examples of this. Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are two sides of the same coin. Together they adorably solve murder mysteries, fueled by dry martinis and victories celebrated with plenty of fizzy champagne. These movies predate political or health correctness. They make it seem that what may be bad for the liver is still good for the heart.
Sometimes a marriage is on the verge of divorce when the couple realizes they are making a huge mistake. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne turn back from divorcing at the last minute in The Awful Truth (1937, a screwball comedy, screenplay by Vina Delmar adapting a play by Arthur Richman) and again in Penny Serenade (1941, a drama, Morrie Ryskind adapting the story by Martha Cheavens).
Sometimes a traumatic event can make a couple realize that what they have in common (children, for example) far outweighs their differences. In Jurassic World (2015, screenplay by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Colin Trevorrow, and Derek Connolly, based on Michael Crichton’s novels), there is a divorce subplot. The two boys at the heart of the movie, who are maybe 12 and 16, have been shipped off to the park while their parents get divorced. But when Mom and Dad realize their sons were nearly eaten by dinosaurs, they tearfully reunite the family. If the stakes are high enough, they can transcend a lot of obstacles. In life and death situations, petty differences can vanish.
Whether you want to tell the story of honeymooners squabbling, a dead marriage reviving, or any of the above, know that married love stories can be as strong as any others, if you use what you’re learning about how love stories work.