Eternal ennui A
Goldblum saves story of second honeymoon from turning sour, writes Sue de Groot
Le Weekend
T the end of 1999’s Notting Hill, after a girl stood in front of a boy and asked him to love her, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts were left sitting on a garden bench in a shiny bubble of eternal bliss. Le Weekend, also directed by Roger Michell, is about a different couple in a very different phase: not so much blissful as eternally bickering. One gets the feeling that they would happily bash each other’s heads in with a salt cellar if they weren’t English and polite.
On a good day, Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) read the papers over breakfast without speaking. On a bad day, they shoot poisonous verbal darts at each other. Were there some fire in the delivery, these spats might be charged with emotion. Instead, their weary jibes seem dredged from a pit in which no fondness has survived.
Nick and Meg go to Paris for their 30th wedding anniversary, not expecting to cure their chronically ill marriage but perhaps hoping for a short remission. The hotel they stayed in on their honeymoon, however, has suffered the same fate as their marriage and has become, as Meg puts it, “beige”. She insists on moving to a gilded establishment they can’t afford, an act of economic rebellion that gives them both a bit of a shock. Not enough to revive their old feelings for each other, but enough to stop viewers from slitting their wrists with sharpened popcorn at the sheer bleakness of it all.
“Bumbling” is a word that might have been invented for Broadbent and most of the characters he plays. Nick has bumbled his way out of a job as a philosophy lecturer (he was fired for making a disparaging remark about an African student’s hair) and his weak attempts to bumble back into his wife’s affections are painfully inadequate.
Meg, a French teacher, seizes every chance to put her husband down, and no one spits middle-class acid the way Duncan does. Room service and an enormous bed do not provide a path back to tenderness, nor do the lights of Paris, although the splendour of the city as location at least provides some relief for those watching this claustrophobic spousal battle.
Filmmakers have a devious relationship with Paris. They clear the boulevards of the crowds, exhaust fumes, scooters and dog faeces with which they are usually clogged, creating a false fairytale. Meg and Nick continue to fight their way through this make-believe paradise. If it weren’t for the redeeming performance of Jeff Goldblum, we’d be reaching for the popcorn sharpener again.
In the eyes of many film lovers, Goldblum will always be a Ghostbuster. As Morgan, an obnoxious American who has achieved both wealth and academic superstar status, he teases out the ghost of marriage past, provoking a sense of urgency that Nick and Meg seem to have mislaid in their long years together. Their arguments take on a new intensity, Nick discovers a backbone inside his mollusc shell and the film ends, if not on a hopeful note, at least a little more cheerful than the desperate gloom with which it opens. LS