This tale of marriage misery is not worth the commitment
Is it possible to sue two actors for false advertising? At the Venice Film Festival last month, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain put on quite a display during the red carpet photocall for Scenes From a Marriage (Sky Atlantic). He nuzzled her arm and gazed into her eyes with a look so smouldering that camera lenses melted.
Cor, we were all supposed to think, this show will be sizzling! Alas, it’s deathly. A remake of a 1970s Ingmar Bergman drama that prompted a rise in Sweden’s divorce rate, it asks us to watch two unlikeable people in various stages of misery.
Director and screenwriter Hagai Levi has given it a bloodless modern update. Mira (Chastain) is a VP of product management for a tech company. Jonathan (Isaac) is an academic who does most of the childcare. The way Jonathan speaks will make you lose the will to live: as when Mira tells him she’s pregnant and he says: “Why don’t we think about this in a slightly more deterministic way?” When listing his defining features, he includes “Democrat” and “asthmatic”.
Levi has also added a gimmicky framing device: each episode begins with the actor getting ready to play the character, so we see Chastain or Isaac surrounded by crew members before someone yells “action”. It means our emotional engagement with the characters is low. Levi has said it is his way of indicating that the story is about all marriages, and not the specific one on screen. Certainly, you’ll watch it and won’t be able to help interrogating your own relationship. If you’re in the throes of separation, particularly if there are children involved, this could be painful viewing.
This device also indicates whose perspective we are going to be getting. The first episode is weighted in Mira’s favour; Jonathan is portrayed as one of those annoying men who speaks on his wife’s behalf, and who has issues with the fact that she is the breadwinner. In episode two, which is far better than the first, Mira drops the bombshell that she’s having an affair and in the same breath asks if Jonathan has picked up her dry cleaning. We quickly side with him, helped by the fact that Isaac is an intense actor who digs deep here.
Some of the lines can be brutal, as when a desperate Jonathan insists they can fix things and Mira shoots back: “I’m not attracted to you any more. How do we fix that?” But mostly the pretentious details deaden everything. Mira’s new man is “CEO of an Israeli start-up”; the couple sit down with a PHD student studying “how evolving gender norms impact marriages”. I’m consciously uncoupling from this show after two episodes.
Paul Merson believes that he has his addictions to alcohol and cocaine under control, but gambling still has him in its grip. Last year he lost all the money he’d saved for a house deposit – he lives in a modest rented property with his wife and young children, having previously gambled away his more than £7 million fortune. At that point he stopped placing bets. But the next one, he fears, is just around the corner.
In Paul Merson: Football, Gambling & Me (BBC One), the former Arsenal star tried to make sense of it all. He started by meeting Wes Reid, who was with him in the Arsenal reserves when he was 17. They visited the bookmakers where Merson placed his first bet, five minutes from the old Highbury stadium. Reid produced a photograph from those days, of them with another kid playing cards in a hotel room on tour. Reid was bored, wanting to go to the pool and have some fun. Merson played on until he had lost all his money. And things never changed.
Merson has battled so many demons over the years, and so publicly, that he is comfortable with confessional TV. He spoke directly into the camera, and was often moved to tears. He also met the relatives of three young men who had taken their lives due to their gambling addictions, all with heartbreaking stories to tell.
Trying to get to the root of his addiction, Merson took part in a study to map his brain activity. It revealed, to no one’s surprise, that he responded far more strongly to images of gambling than he did to things that bring non-addicts pleasure: food, nature, family. These types of documentaries always feel the need to add some science, but it felt like a side issue here.
Instead of looking backwards, Merson needs to address the here and now. The moment that stuck out was his admission, late in the programme, that he feels bored by the “groundhog day” sameness of his life – taking the children to school, trips to the park. “That’s life,” his wife had told him. Viewers will feel as much sympathy for her after watching this documentary as they do for him.
Scenes From a Marriage ★★ Paul Merson: Football, Gambling and Me ★★★★