Marriage story
A review requested by Carl, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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It is highly likely that 1999's The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally... in any case. Both films share extremely similar structural conceits, in which the entire history of a relationship is broken down into fragments that are skipped between throughout the movie, giving them less of the feeling of a fluid narrative than a collection of incidents which quietly accumulate into something bigger, although The Story of Us takes this farther by presenting these fragments as out-of-order flashbacks. There's a scene in a restaurant in The Story of Us that feels extremely obviously like someone wanted to have a version of the "I'll have what she's having" deli scene from When Harry Met Sally... of their own. The editing in both cases is rather "visible", in a way that's clearly meant to read as playful and punchy, inviting us in to think about how the film is deliberately comparing and contrasting different scenes and moments. Both explicitly create "Team Men" and "Team Women" to allow for alternating conversations about What Relationships Are Like based on gender stereotypes, which I concede was certainly not unique to When Harry Met Sally... by 1999, but I think that's the movie that more or less innovated that as a structural conceit for romcoms.
But just in case we could overlook the comparison, there's a kicker, which is that The Story of Us, like its 1989 predecessor, was directed by Rob Reiner (both films were also edited by Robert Leighton - he's joined for The Story of Us by Alan Edward Bell - which is probably mostly because he worked on every Reiner film between 1985 and 2013, but given the centrality of the editing to both films' effect, it seems worth singling out). So it feels not merely like a rip-off of When Harry Met Sally..., it feels like a proper companion piece to When Harry Met Sally..., an attempt to complicate the generic requirements of the romcom by suggesting that after the meeting cute, the arch banter, and the giddy rush towards that first declaration of love, what's left is the grinding hard work of two people reassembling their lives around each other and moving from giddy romance to quotidian familiarity, and we all know the thing that familiarity breeds. I guess I can see where this is even a respectable impulse, pointing out the foundational lie of an entire genre, but if I am being honest, in the choice between a film that tells a profoundly satisfying lie, and a film that sells a sour, ambivalent truth, the lie seems much more watchable. Maybe not if you're Ingmar Bergman, but very few people are.
Reiner isn't at least, and the thing about The Story of Us is that it's no so much confronting us with the hard truth as it is telling a different kind of lie, and doing a much worse job of it than he had in 1989. This is one of the other things that it is interesting and useful about the movie: it provides a remarkable prism with which to contemplate the even more remarkable fall of Reiner's directorial career. When Harry Met Sally... is part of truly extraordinary run of well-made, unassuming popular entertainments, quietly perfect little bits of Hollywood at its crowd-pleasing best. His 1984 debut This Is Spinal Tap, 1986's Stand by Me, 1987's The Princess Bride, 1990's Misery... these represent a remarkable sustained achievement in deeply pleasurable movies in multiple different genres, with a wide mix of tones and acting styles. The first significant dent to be made in that gleaming armor came with 1994's viscerally derided North, best known as the film that Roger Ebert hated hated hated hated hated. Another dent came in 1998 (a good film came in between, The American President in 1995), with Ghosts of Mississippi, but I am tempted to wonder if it was with The Story of Us itself that we arrive at the terminal stage of Reiner's career; you can argue that North and Ghosts of Mississippi are just unfortunately outside of his wheelhouse, as you cannot with The Story of Us, which feels in some sense like Reiner is too comfortable, and it would be better if he was trying to challenge himself more.
The "us" whose story this is are the Jordans, Ben (Bruce Willis, who was also in North) and Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer), who have been married 15 years, and are unlikely to make it to 16. As they explain to us in direct-address monologues (one of the main ways this resembles Reiner's 10-years-older masterpiece), they have both formed some fairly complete theories about Married Life over the last decade and a half, and they're increasingly feeling chafed and unhappy in this particular version of Married Life. The main forward-moving part of the movie concerns what happens when they send their children, 12-year-old Josh (Jake Sandvig) and 10-year-old Erin (Colleen Rennison) to summer camp, and use that time to embark on a trial separation, though Katie, for one, seems to have already made up her mind about the verdict. As they muddle through the next few weeks, occasionally reaching out to each other and getting all awkwardly sentimental before erupting into fights, they recall various moments in their lives together, reflecting on how they have and haven't changed, and itching at the most painful scabs of moments where one of the other had some exceptionally clear-eyed realisation about how extremely unhappy they were getting.
Again, in theory this is sound. In practice, it completely sucks, in large part because writers Alan Zweibel (who wrote the novel on which North was based) & Jessie Nelson (who has written nothing quite as infamous as North, though this came sandwiched in her filmography directly between Stepmom and I Am Sam - which she also directed! - in her filmography, so she's no angel either) have made such a smoldering wreck of their two main characters. In 95-minute film whose solitary purpose in the world is to give us an insight into how Ben and Katie conceive of marriage generally and their marriage specifically, The Story of Us is remarkably bad at doing that one specific thing. At the end of this film, I do not know who those people are. I do not know what their married life was like. I do not know why they first fell in love. I do not know when the seeds of doubt crept in. I do not know what either of them feels towards either of their children. I know that it frustrates Ben when Katie gets distracted (even temporarily) from having sex, and I know that it frustrates Katie when Ben would rather goof with the kids than set boundaries for them, and when he is less mindful of household chores than she is. That kind of unimaginative stereotyping would barely pass muster in a third-rate sitcom; it is ruinous for a feature film with this kind of pedigree. From such wobbly foundations, the film has nowhere to take its characters; they're angry because they have to be, it says so right there in the script, and nothing about their behavior feels authentic in any way. One of the film's big moments has Ben watching as the apartment the couple used to live in is demolished, making jocular reference to the symbolism as he calls Katie to tell her what's going on; she's busy trying to keep the kids from murdering each other as she holds the phone to her ear and ignores him. It is a moment written, staged, and performed to express the idea of "a couple that can't communicate" in the most artificial, mechanical way, and it is in this respect sadly typical of how the Jordans' fights are conceived.
As far as they are able, Willis and Pfeiffer try to make something out of this. I don't know that it's fair to say she tries harder, but she's more successful; she finds something more realistically hurt and angry to base Katie's screaming in (this is the kind of movie where almost every scene ultimately serves the function "make the leads scream at each other"), and she almost finds a path through the dense forest of her final monologue, a massive slab of words that contradict each other, and contradict the film around them, and try to balance heartfelt sentimentality with wacky verbal farce and all of it while she's barely avoiding crying. It's complete nonsense, present so that Zweibel & Nelson can course-correct towards what I imagine they thought was the "right" ending (it is not, but there's no "right" ending for a character-based story whose main characters went wrong so early), but she at least finds an emotional throughline that allows her to pretend it's all one thing, even it means that she's suddenly playing a different character than she was for the rest of the movie. Willis is tasked with more of the "funny" bits in a movie with a very soggy sense of humor, and he's got enough charm in reserve that he can fake it; but his days as a reliable comic actor were pretty far in the past at this point, and he's pretty stiff in all of the comic bits. He's better in the screaming scenes (maybe because he was himself in the midst of a divorce at the time), but the film has been written to feel like Ben isn't really the one making the choice to get divorced, so he's got less fuel to work with there.
The comedy bits, for the record, are all pretty bad, and more than anything else showcase the collapse of Reiner's directing. This is R-rated sitcom stuff, and he absolutely shouldn't have had a problem plowing through it to at least get some feeble laughs, if not actual great comedy. Most of the gags are sort of "literate filthy" notably the scenes where Rita Wilson plays one of Katie's best gal pals, and gets a big showcase speech about violent ramming penises and gentle vaginas that is just not playing. It's not Wilson's fault; she's making a hammy meal out of the material, and at least seems to be having fun. But there's this weird, muted feeling to the whole movie that doesn't match at all with the bawdy jokes, here or in the scenes where Reiner himself and an uncredited Paul Reiser play Ben's buddies. This film's analogue to the deli scene is a great example: it's meant to be this big, slightly terrifying and slightly hilarious moment where Ben just starts screaming in a restaurant, but it's paced terribly, and Willis doesn't seem comfortable going for it, and the final punchline is a complete non-starter that requires we found a different scene funny that didn't play either. Reiser, maybe surprisingly and maybe not, is by far the best comic presence in the film; he had just wrapped up his own sitcom tenure with the seventh and final season of Mad About You airing several months before The Story of Us premiered, and so perhaps it's as simple as being more comfortable with the shticky cadences of the writing than anybody else in the cast, but I don't actually think he's being any broader than anyone else. But something in his line deliveries works that's not working anyplace else.
It's not all on the actors, though. The film is suffocating on itself; it has this endless Land's End catalogue vibe, where everything has been shot with soft golden lighting and shallow focus by Michael Chapman, making all of the tastefully-decorated spaces feel extra-tasteful, and denuded of human existence. The score was composed by Eric Clapton, assisted by actual movie music composer Marc Shaiman, and this was an exceptionally acoustic period for Clapton; the music here is full of soft, maudling plunks on a solo guitar. The entire mood of the film is so crushingly tasteful and bourgeois, and it can never wake up: the point where I finally went from "I don't like this" to "I in fact hate this" was a late montage of all the good and bad moments in the Jordan's marriage, set to the Mason Williams instrumental "Classical Gas". And not even the version of "Classical Gas" with full orchestration, the solo guitar version. Between the drowsy energy of the music and the completely haphazard ordering of the snatches of imagery in the montage, it feels like one final effort to murder whatever humanity lives in this concept beneath a crushing block of bourgeois stuffiness. Not that the film was ever anything but bourgeois, and stuffy, but there's something extra miserable about watching it try to do something "stylish" and only succeed in amplifying those tendencies.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
It is highly likely that 1999's The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally... in any case. Both films share extremely similar structural conceits, in which the entire history of a relationship is broken down into fragments that are skipped between throughout the movie, giving them less of the feeling of a fluid narrative than a collection of incidents which quietly accumulate into something bigger, although The Story of Us takes this farther by presenting these fragments as out-of-order flashbacks. There's a scene in a restaurant in The Story of Us that feels extremely obviously like someone wanted to have a version of the "I'll have what she's having" deli scene from When Harry Met Sally... of their own. The editing in both cases is rather "visible", in a way that's clearly meant to read as playful and punchy, inviting us in to think about how the film is deliberately comparing and contrasting different scenes and moments. Both explicitly create "Team Men" and "Team Women" to allow for alternating conversations about What Relationships Are Like based on gender stereotypes, which I concede was certainly not unique to When Harry Met Sally... by 1999, but I think that's the movie that more or less innovated that as a structural conceit for romcoms.
But just in case we could overlook the comparison, there's a kicker, which is that The Story of Us, like its 1989 predecessor, was directed by Rob Reiner (both films were also edited by Robert Leighton - he's joined for The Story of Us by Alan Edward Bell - which is probably mostly because he worked on every Reiner film between 1985 and 2013, but given the centrality of the editing to both films' effect, it seems worth singling out). So it feels not merely like a rip-off of When Harry Met Sally..., it feels like a proper companion piece to When Harry Met Sally..., an attempt to complicate the generic requirements of the romcom by suggesting that after the meeting cute, the arch banter, and the giddy rush towards that first declaration of love, what's left is the grinding hard work of two people reassembling their lives around each other and moving from giddy romance to quotidian familiarity, and we all know the thing that familiarity breeds. I guess I can see where this is even a respectable impulse, pointing out the foundational lie of an entire genre, but if I am being honest, in the choice between a film that tells a profoundly satisfying lie, and a film that sells a sour, ambivalent truth, the lie seems much more watchable. Maybe not if you're Ingmar Bergman, but very few people are.
Reiner isn't at least, and the thing about The Story of Us is that it's no so much confronting us with the hard truth as it is telling a different kind of lie, and doing a much worse job of it than he had in 1989. This is one of the other things that it is interesting and useful about the movie: it provides a remarkable prism with which to contemplate the even more remarkable fall of Reiner's directorial career. When Harry Met Sally... is part of truly extraordinary run of well-made, unassuming popular entertainments, quietly perfect little bits of Hollywood at its crowd-pleasing best. His 1984 debut This Is Spinal Tap, 1986's Stand by Me, 1987's The Princess Bride, 1990's Misery... these represent a remarkable sustained achievement in deeply pleasurable movies in multiple different genres, with a wide mix of tones and acting styles. The first significant dent to be made in that gleaming armor came with 1994's viscerally derided North, best known as the film that Roger Ebert hated hated hated hated hated. Another dent came in 1998 (a good film came in between, The American President in 1995), with Ghosts of Mississippi, but I am tempted to wonder if it was with The Story of Us itself that we arrive at the terminal stage of Reiner's career; you can argue that North and Ghosts of Mississippi are just unfortunately outside of his wheelhouse, as you cannot with The Story of Us, which feels in some sense like Reiner is too comfortable, and it would be better if he was trying to challenge himself more.
The "us" whose story this is are the Jordans, Ben (Bruce Willis, who was also in North) and Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer), who have been married 15 years, and are unlikely to make it to 16. As they explain to us in direct-address monologues (one of the main ways this resembles Reiner's 10-years-older masterpiece), they have both formed some fairly complete theories about Married Life over the last decade and a half, and they're increasingly feeling chafed and unhappy in this particular version of Married Life. The main forward-moving part of the movie concerns what happens when they send their children, 12-year-old Josh (Jake Sandvig) and 10-year-old Erin (Colleen Rennison) to summer camp, and use that time to embark on a trial separation, though Katie, for one, seems to have already made up her mind about the verdict. As they muddle through the next few weeks, occasionally reaching out to each other and getting all awkwardly sentimental before erupting into fights, they recall various moments in their lives together, reflecting on how they have and haven't changed, and itching at the most painful scabs of moments where one of the other had some exceptionally clear-eyed realisation about how extremely unhappy they were getting.
Again, in theory this is sound. In practice, it completely sucks, in large part because writers Alan Zweibel (who wrote the novel on which North was based) & Jessie Nelson (who has written nothing quite as infamous as North, though this came sandwiched in her filmography directly between Stepmom and I Am Sam - which she also directed! - in her filmography, so she's no angel either) have made such a smoldering wreck of their two main characters. In 95-minute film whose solitary purpose in the world is to give us an insight into how Ben and Katie conceive of marriage generally and their marriage specifically, The Story of Us is remarkably bad at doing that one specific thing. At the end of this film, I do not know who those people are. I do not know what their married life was like. I do not know why they first fell in love. I do not know when the seeds of doubt crept in. I do not know what either of them feels towards either of their children. I know that it frustrates Ben when Katie gets distracted (even temporarily) from having sex, and I know that it frustrates Katie when Ben would rather goof with the kids than set boundaries for them, and when he is less mindful of household chores than she is. That kind of unimaginative stereotyping would barely pass muster in a third-rate sitcom; it is ruinous for a feature film with this kind of pedigree. From such wobbly foundations, the film has nowhere to take its characters; they're angry because they have to be, it says so right there in the script, and nothing about their behavior feels authentic in any way. One of the film's big moments has Ben watching as the apartment the couple used to live in is demolished, making jocular reference to the symbolism as he calls Katie to tell her what's going on; she's busy trying to keep the kids from murdering each other as she holds the phone to her ear and ignores him. It is a moment written, staged, and performed to express the idea of "a couple that can't communicate" in the most artificial, mechanical way, and it is in this respect sadly typical of how the Jordans' fights are conceived.
As far as they are able, Willis and Pfeiffer try to make something out of this. I don't know that it's fair to say she tries harder, but she's more successful; she finds something more realistically hurt and angry to base Katie's screaming in (this is the kind of movie where almost every scene ultimately serves the function "make the leads scream at each other"), and she almost finds a path through the dense forest of her final monologue, a massive slab of words that contradict each other, and contradict the film around them, and try to balance heartfelt sentimentality with wacky verbal farce and all of it while she's barely avoiding crying. It's complete nonsense, present so that Zweibel & Nelson can course-correct towards what I imagine they thought was the "right" ending (it is not, but there's no "right" ending for a character-based story whose main characters went wrong so early), but she at least finds an emotional throughline that allows her to pretend it's all one thing, even it means that she's suddenly playing a different character than she was for the rest of the movie. Willis is tasked with more of the "funny" bits in a movie with a very soggy sense of humor, and he's got enough charm in reserve that he can fake it; but his days as a reliable comic actor were pretty far in the past at this point, and he's pretty stiff in all of the comic bits. He's better in the screaming scenes (maybe because he was himself in the midst of a divorce at the time), but the film has been written to feel like Ben isn't really the one making the choice to get divorced, so he's got less fuel to work with there.
The comedy bits, for the record, are all pretty bad, and more than anything else showcase the collapse of Reiner's directing. This is R-rated sitcom stuff, and he absolutely shouldn't have had a problem plowing through it to at least get some feeble laughs, if not actual great comedy. Most of the gags are sort of "literate filthy" notably the scenes where Rita Wilson plays one of Katie's best gal pals, and gets a big showcase speech about violent ramming penises and gentle vaginas that is just not playing. It's not Wilson's fault; she's making a hammy meal out of the material, and at least seems to be having fun. But there's this weird, muted feeling to the whole movie that doesn't match at all with the bawdy jokes, here or in the scenes where Reiner himself and an uncredited Paul Reiser play Ben's buddies. This film's analogue to the deli scene is a great example: it's meant to be this big, slightly terrifying and slightly hilarious moment where Ben just starts screaming in a restaurant, but it's paced terribly, and Willis doesn't seem comfortable going for it, and the final punchline is a complete non-starter that requires we found a different scene funny that didn't play either. Reiser, maybe surprisingly and maybe not, is by far the best comic presence in the film; he had just wrapped up his own sitcom tenure with the seventh and final season of Mad About You airing several months before The Story of Us premiered, and so perhaps it's as simple as being more comfortable with the shticky cadences of the writing than anybody else in the cast, but I don't actually think he's being any broader than anyone else. But something in his line deliveries works that's not working anyplace else.
It's not all on the actors, though. The film is suffocating on itself; it has this endless Land's End catalogue vibe, where everything has been shot with soft golden lighting and shallow focus by Michael Chapman, making all of the tastefully-decorated spaces feel extra-tasteful, and denuded of human existence. The score was composed by Eric Clapton, assisted by actual movie music composer Marc Shaiman, and this was an exceptionally acoustic period for Clapton; the music here is full of soft, maudling plunks on a solo guitar. The entire mood of the film is so crushingly tasteful and bourgeois, and it can never wake up: the point where I finally went from "I don't like this" to "I in fact hate this" was a late montage of all the good and bad moments in the Jordan's marriage, set to the Mason Williams instrumental "Classical Gas". And not even the version of "Classical Gas" with full orchestration, the solo guitar version. Between the drowsy energy of the music and the completely haphazard ordering of the snatches of imagery in the montage, it feels like one final effort to murder whatever humanity lives in this concept beneath a crushing block of bourgeois stuffiness. Not that the film was ever anything but bourgeois, and stuffy, but there's something extra miserable about watching it try to do something "stylish" and only succeed in amplifying those tendencies.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
