On one level, "The Story of Us" plays like one of those shallow "dramedies" that turn up regularly on the Lifetime network. Most of the pain it exposes is surface level, the conflicts often feel manufactured and the comic elements writers Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson have shoehorned into their script generally operate at cross-purposes with the overall theme of the film.
Yet somehow the movie comes close to hitting its mark nonetheless. That's largely due to the combined star power of Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis, and also to some genuinely evocative patches in Zweibel and Nelson's screenplay. Every time "Story" wanders perilously close to the border of soap opera, the authors steer it back on course.
Although the subject matter -- an upper-middle-class couple drifting straight for the rocks -- inspires memories of such searing break-up dramas as Diane Keaton and Albert Finney's "Shoot the Moon" or the classic "Two For the Road" with Finney and Audrey Hepburn, the glossy execution of "Story" recalls last Christmas' "Stepmom," another attempt to address a difficult subject in a crowdpleasing manner. "Stepmom" was a bit more effective than this film because it focused mostly on the young woman (Julia Roberts) trying to find her place in her husband's family and the ex-wife (Susan Sarandon) struggling to hold on to a world she was no longer intimately a part of.
"Story" is more scattershot, and while we may root for Kate (Pfeiffer) and Ben (Willis) Jordan to overcome their differences and rekindle that old flame, we'd be cheering more enthusiastically if the movie had let us get a better sense of their history together. What it presents instead are flashes of events major and minor, from the time Ben and Kate tried to get it on on the kitchen counter to the death of their son's goldfish.
The rest of the movie shifts a bit uneasily between some nasty marital arguments and several quirky discussions between Kate and Ben and their friends, played by comedians such as Paul Reiser, Rita Wilson (who gets to do a reprise of her weeping fit from "Sleepless in Seattle"), Julie Hagerty and Reiner himself. A lot of this talk is undeniably amusing ("the Ten Commandments were probably a lot easier to stick to when you dropped dead at 35," Reiser's character moans), but it also serves to severely dilutes whatever impact the main story might have. The jokey segments tend to stop the picture cold, often just as it's building some momentum.
The gimmick of having characters speak directly to the audience is currently being done to death both in movies and on TV, but it works surprisingly well here, as Ben and Kate's confessions turn out to be among the film's strongest bits. At one point, Kate compares her relationship with her husband to the children's book "Harold and the Purple Crayon," explaining that Harold was always determined to create his own perfect environment. "When one person is always drawing the world the way they want it to be, the other person has to draw the world the way it is," she sighes, "which is probably why they never wrote a book about Harold's wife."
There's also a certain poignancy in Ben and Kate's careful conversations about whether or not their kids are "O.K.," as well as in the borderline ridiculous excuses they make for calling each other during a period of separation.
The movie's ultimate trump card, however, is a breathless, delirious monologue Kate delivers near the end. It's a moment that might have been insufferable in the hands of a less skilled actress, but Pfeiffer makes the words ring with hurt, humor and pure emotion. "The Story of Us" has more than its share of aggravating bits and empty scenes, but the finale manages to tip the scales in its favor. James Sanford
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