Raw and real relationships
THE GOOD Mad About You
This 1990s comedy starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as a pair of New York newlyweds covered everything from the daily minutia of married life through to major relationship struggles. The controversial finale flashed forward 22 years where the couple’s grown-up daughter, now a filmmaker, revealed her parents had separated decades earlier. They reunite at the end of the episode.
I Love Lucy
Real-life spouses Lucille Ball and Desi
Arnaz played OTT versions of themselves in this classic sitcom. The playful bickering between their characters endeared them to audiences around the world. But behind the scenes all was not rosy and they divorced. A miniseries about the couple’s relationship, starring Nicole
Kidman as Ball and Javier Bardem as Arnaz, is in production. cti
Shock from the truth, from the brutality, from the naked truths. But also, I was amazed by the fact that you can be so minimalistic and like two people talking and still create like high art.”
In modernising the series, Levi
The First Wives Club
Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette e
Midler play estranged school friends who bond when they each discover their husbands have been having affairs with much younger women.
Joining forces, the scorned women plot their revenge against the men who have done them wrong and find new confidence and independence in the process.
THE BAD Divorce
Supposedly a black comedy, this series marked Sarah Jessica Parker’s much- hyped return to TV after the end of Sex and the City. Parker played a mother-of-two who, after having an affair, decides to leave her husband.
The greatest question here wasn’t why
Parker’s character would stray but how she could have stayed married to her man-child of a husband for so long.
Kramer vs Kramer
Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep both won Oscars playing a couple fighting over custody of their young son. It’s since emerged
Hoffman harassed Streep on set, hurling insults and taunting her with the name of her recently deceased fiance, actor John Cazale.
Hoffman, a method actor, claimed the abuse was designed to extract a better performance from
Streep.
But in 2018, Streep told The New
York Times that Hoffman had slapped her, without warning, during a scene: “This was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”
Blue Valentine
This rather bleak movie shifts between the early courtship of an aspiring doctor (Michelle Williams) has flipped the genders of the characters so that it is Chastain’s character, Mira, who is the breadwinner while husband, Jonathon, is the stay-at-home parent.
Chastain says she was grateful not to be playing a new version of Ullman’s character from the original series.
“What I am happy about with our series is that no one is playing Marianne because there’s only one Marianne and that’s Liv and a hapless romantic house painter
(Ryan Gosling) and the nasty end to their marriage.
THE UGLY Marriage Story
Another divorce movie, this time inspired by the director Noah Baumbach’s own break- up with actor Jennifer Jason Leigh. Here Scarlett Johansson is an actor fed up with being sidelined by her director husband’s ambition, and so moves across the country to further her own career, taking their young son with them. The bitterness between the former couple escalates into all-out war when cutthroat lawyers get involved in their divorce proceedings.
Revolutionary Road
They played one of the most beloved couples in cinematic history in Titanic. But when
Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet reteamed for this 2008 drama (directed by Winslet’s thenhusband Sam Mendes) it proved even more heartbreaking than the sight of Jack slipping beneath the icy waves. Here they play an unhappy couple who each feel stifled by their suburban life.
The Affair
Dominic West (who recently made headlines for his own real-life extramarital affair) plays a cuckolded husband who falls in love with a waitress he meets at a diner while on summer holiday with his large family. Each episode of the series tells the same story from the viewpoint of two different characters involved, giving insight into how an individual’s perspective can shape an experience and lead to conflict.
Ullman,” she says.
“This is the modern adaptation of Mira, who’s basically Johan. But in 2020 … we’re in an interesting time in society where a lot of women are the breadwinners of their families.
“And there’s some shame in that they feel embarrassed, or they feel like ‘I don’t want to emasculate my husband’ or to make them feel bad.
“So, they make themselves smaller at home because they want their husband to feel like he’s the king in the house.
“Well, you know what, what happens is whenever if you have to go home and you have to make yourself small, that’s not a healthy relationship.”
Scenes From a Marriage, which premiered on Foxtel this week and is available on demand, is just the latest in a long history of screen relationship breakdowns.
The first time I watched it, the effect was like just shock