Overview: Life, death and making meaning are the heart of a beautiful and often very funny film about an aging couple who, after an accident, face the inevitability of impermanence and seek a deep peace in their relationship while they still can.
Even though I didn't know these people, nor I had I ever heard of them - I still felt myself quite invested in their story. Maggie Barrett is a mere 75 years old and the spring chicken in her marriage...
Even though I didn't know these people, nor I had I ever heard of them - I still felt myself quite invested in their story. Maggie Barrett is a mere 75 years old and the spring chicken in her marriage with 84 years old Joel Meyerowitz. He has been married before, a long time ago, and has a family and he is also the more commercially successful as a photographer. Maggie is a novelist used to the rejection letters. It's perhaps this latter element that leaves her feeling somewhat under-appreciated. Not by him, directly, but by a general feeling of not being good enough, or important enough, or both! Their livelihoods are hardly spartan. Despite having fallen foul of the financial market collapse, they still manage to spend their time between an apartment on Manhattan and an home in Tuscany, and for the most part have lived the life of an happily married coupled - complete with ups and downs. She has now been diagnosed with an especially unpleasant sort of osteoporosis which is doing the one thing that neither are really very well psychologically equipped for. It's debilitating her and that frustration is putting the pressure on their relationship. She's like a pressure cooker - when she blows her top she can be selfish, cruel and appear completely unaware that he, who has his own medical issues, is just as exasperated as she is. That old adage about it being easier to be poorly than be the one who watches is laid bare here as they face mortality together, but not always joined up. It's not like they haven't been expecting it, it's just that it seems to be happening the wrong way round, and no-one is really prepared for this painful physical decline. Now I won't lie, I didn't actually like Maggie very much. Self indulgent sprung to mind, indeed at times the prurient fly-on-the-wall nature of this film made me wonder if this couple deserved my attention. So what? They are elderly and have a had a great life doing, with varying degrees of success, what they've wanted to do. They are not hungry or homeless, and some of the dialogue is just as inanely anodyne as that which the rest of us churn out on a daily basis. Joel comes across as a gently considerate man, a loving gent caught up in circumstance that he can only grin and bear. He doesn't tend to get much of a word in! Why watch? Well, in the end I felt it an interesting example of can't live with sometimes, can't live without ever - and for the most part I did believe they were not performing to the camera even if she is prone to some melodramatic Anglo-Saxon ranting from time to time. As an observation of the process of getting old, it's worth a watch - if only because it gives us insight into how those close to home might be dealing with something similarly inevitable and difficult.
