HUSBANDS & WIVES (1992)
"People grow apart; it's a lot of little personal things."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Liam Neeson, Juliette Lewis Written & Directed by Woody Allen Cinematography by Carlo di Palma
In MANHATTAN, Woody Allen filmed a love letter to New York; it was a romantic, sentimental vision of a city and its people, full of glorious black-and-white postcard shots and charming portraits. Diane Keaton's character's obsessive self-analysis came across as an endearing mannerism, while Mariel Hemingway's teenage love interest did not represent anything unhealthy, but simply a stabilizing influence and a naïve faith in life to counter the Allen character's angst.
My, how things change. HUSBANDS & WIVES, fifteen years later, turns MANHATTAN inside out. If the earlier film was an unequivocal declaration of love, then the later one is the divorce proceedings after the relationship has broken down. Here, we see a New York that is drab and brown and anonymous, filmed with a jittery hand-held camera. Mia Farrow's character's constant dissection of herself and her relationship is aggravating in the extreme; Juliette Lewis, the precocious love interest, represents nothing healthy at all, but instead typifies the Allen character's self-destructive obsession with unstable women.
It is occasionally very funny (e.g., when Judy Davis's character reveals what she actually thinks about during sex), but more often than not it is painful and uncomfortable. Where MANHATTAN was three-quarters comedy and one-quarter drama, HUSBANDS & WIVES inverses those proportions. It pries into the characters' innermost lives, and exposes them, warts and all--although, figuratively speaking, when you take away the warts, there isn't much left.
But they seem to be happy enough, when we first meet them. Gabe and Judy (Allen, Farrow), a married couple, are about to go out to dinner with their good friends Sally and Jack (Davis, Sydney Pollack), when Sally and Jack drop a bombshell: they are planning to separate. This stuns Gabe and especially Judy, who is more upset than either Sally or Jack, both of whom discuss their separation with equanimity. No one's angry, they say; it's not a tragedy. But they are; it is.
The "happy" separation lasts until Jack moves in with someone else. Then, in one of the finest scenes, Sally, furious, calls him up and rants at him, as her date for the evening listens from another room. Sally hurls accusations at her ex, then walks out, smooths down her dress, and assures her date that she's fine ... then walks back to the other room, calls Jack again, and raves some more. The violently raw emotion of Sally's monologue makes us cringe; the reaction shots of her date in the other room make us laugh. Allen, handling his material as well as he ever has, is able to make both the drama and the comedy work: the tone is always just right.
After Sally and Jack separate, and reveal the cuts that have been festering beneath the band-aid of their marriage, Gabe and Judy in turn analyze their own relationship. She wants a baby; he doesn't. They argue. Finally, he agrees to have sex without contraception, and she doesn't want to: now she's not ready for a baby. This kind of emotional doublethink is second nature to these people, and Allen sees it very clearly, as when Judy sets up Sally with one of her co-workers (Liam Neeson), only to admit later that she was attracted to him herself.
While there is a cutting edge to his wit, Allen is not cruel to his characters. Jack's new amour, a "tofu and crystals" New Age woman, is lampooned quite savagely, but she comes across much better than Jack in one startling sequence, when he becomes furious with her for embarassing him at a party, and ends up embarassing himself more than she ever could. Nothing is straightforward.
Allen could treat these people with disdain, with their euphemisms and their analysts and their rationalizations and their self-absorption, but instead he sees them for what they are: fairly average people struggling to make some sort of accomodation with life, to make some sense of their incoherent emotions. And while there is sympathy, there is also a refusal to allow them to make any excuses. This even-handedness, this maturity, is what distinguishes the movie from similar--but more simplistic--comedies of modern-day manners. MANHATTAN may be the better movie, but HUSBANDS & WIVES is the wiser one.
A Review by David Dalgleish (September 17/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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