Marriage at the Movies

Romantic comedies and dramas have long been Hollywood staples, but Jeanine Basinger’s I Do and I Don’t reviews the alternative tradition of films about marriage. As Judith Newman says in her NYT review , the trick to making marriage dramatic is to create problems for the married couple.

Newman writes: “Romance movies may demand chemistry, but movies about marriage demand something more difficult to create — a sense that a couple are simpatico, that however much they may bicker and snipe, their deep understanding and feeling for each other will ultimately keep them together. Beloved movie couples like Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, for example, generate more light than heat: in films like ‘That Forsyte Woman’ and ‘Madame Curie,’ they convince us that whatever their problems or station in life, they have each other’s backs. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy worked so well as a married couple not just because they were known to be an off-screen pair, but because, as Basinger explains, they ‘generated a sense of incompatibility, competition, class difference and underlying tension.’ Beyond attraction, there was respect: each saw the other as the most interesting person in the room.”

Hollywood, Newman thinks, sends a strong pro-marriage message: “If these beautiful people on-screen can suffer all sorts of indignities and hurts and profound tedium but still end up together, you can too.”