Undiscovered Country

One of my favorite end-of-year/beginning-of-year features anywhere is Slate's Annual Movie Club. Although writing under the auspices of a well-trafficked web magazine can always be hedged by the knowledge of (critical) readers, SAMC seems to have a freshness, a gentle banter that always helps put movie-going in perspective. (This being said, though I heartily empathize with Dana Stevens's kick-off "war movies conundrum," I found it less enticing than subsequent discussions the group has had over the past few days. Also, even though he shuffled over to New York Magazine last year, where is my beloved Edelstein?!) With Slate's round-up of critics, there's always a sense, too, that optimism is at stake. The hope of seeing a great movie is precisely that which makes us go back to the blackbox theater, or even slush through piles of VHS tapes in the one dollar bin. To find a great movie, we must bear through the rest, or at least have critics tell us which things films worth shelling out greenbacks for. Let it also be noted that there's always the occasional critic whose ideas about movie-making are the complete and total opposite of one's own that we know to love a movie when he/she has slaughtered it.

My point is that there are few great movies of yore (and present) that we encounter nowadays that we haven't had some previous exposure to, or at least some semi-consciousness about. There are so many movies on my list of must-sees -- derived from the lists of hard-core cinephiles -- that I hardly know where to begin. But my parents aren't as bedraggled by the lists of others, and are much more the cinematic risk-takers than I am: so much so that they will walk to our local public library every week to borrow three DVDs, all dependent on what's on the shelves and, they admit, the cover sleeve. Now that I'm on vacation and much of my entertainment is theirs, I was delighted when they came back recently with "Two For the Road". Though a self-proclaimed Audrey Hepburn fan, I had no idea what the movie was or what I was in for. (Then again, how could I pride myself on my personal movie watching cred? I only just saw -- and certainly enjoyed -- the first Indiana Jones this past year!)

But "Two for the Road" is the one movie I watched in 2006 with which I thoroughly fell in love. And not the kind of whimpering, self-effacing love of adolescence, but, rather, the adult version. This year was not so amorous in terms of movie-going for me: I was riveted by "The Queen" and I have yet to see "Children of Men." But traipsing -- and sometimes plundering -- down memory lane with the Wallaces was the best time I'd had since "Eternal Sunshine," not least because of its similar jogs of memory and candor about love. The framework for the film is the French country roads that Joanna (Hepburn) and Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) have traveled together--and the movie is lively and full enough that we can suspend our disbelief about their having taken the same route every time--but their scattered memories of being on the road are interwoven, quite seamlessly. First we see the couple on contemporary, embattled terms, in a plane, about to touch down on France. Then we have the pleasure of seeing them attempt to start their sad sloppy junk of a roadster; and later we see the two, fresh and naive, as they first meet, de-boarding a boat. All the while, we see moments of what was, what is, and an object lesson in how the past can never predict the future, even when the future is already here. (Indeed, such is the case for William Daniels, the man who plays efficiency consultant Howard Manchester, and then later turned out performances every week as Principle Feeny on "Boy Meets World.")

The running gag between them is also the cause of their first meeting -- when Mark loses his passport, Joanna finds it. But what makes this lost-and-found scenario symbolize bumpily married life all too well -- even better than the distraught, mute couples found so often in restaurants (and also refered toby Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine" as "the dining dead") -- is the trickery Joanna deploys and Mark's willing forgetfulness. On the plane or in the car Joanna will ask Mark if he has her passport, he'll search frantically when he can't find it, and, a few beats later, Joanna will fish it out of her bag or the glove compartment and hand it to him. Perhaps she does know him better than he knows himself -- such is the moral conveyed -- but it all feels like a set-up in which they both knowingly participate with each other, for each other. She waits just long enough and he is just forgetful enough to make this central metaphor for their relationship so central: she's seriously playful and he absent-mindedly bullish, but they somehow, together, form a unit. They can't live without each other. Perhaps this would be the case of Henry Mancini developed the soundtrack for all of our lives...

The tagline for "Two for the Road," as I discovered from watching the special feature trailers and IMDB, is "They make something wonderful out of being alive!" (as opposed to the imperative of the movie poster above.) It's sad to see the genuine joys of the film be so woefully, so exuberantly mischaracterized. It's not that the Wallaces don't have high highs and adorable affection for one another; it's that all these come in realistic doses wrought by their situations and not, apparently, by the script. Their wonderfulness is not a pre-determined deal, and that's what makes the film so electric -- we do wonder honestly about the couple for there are moments when it seems it just won't work out. Frederic Raphael, who also adapted "Eyes Wide Shut," seems to know something about relationships. He won't let their most precious, most silly moments be drenched in sap. And he seems to understand something that many others do not: there is a difference between living and making, and, in convincing us of love, the former outdoes the latter every time.