Arts
Divorce Is the New Remarriage
It’s Complicated is a modern rewrite of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in It’s Complicated. © 2009 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.
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The list of reasons to stay divorced from Cary Grant is surely very short. Certainly, if he says something to you like, ”Our marriage was good—it was wonderful!” as he does to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, you would fall immediately back into his arms. The list of reasons to stay divorced from Alec Baldwin, on the other hand, is quite a bit longer. And, when, as in the upcoming It’s Complicated, he leaves you for a thirtysomething, develops a paunch, and occasionally stands you up after you have spent all night making his favorite cake, you are not likely to regret the breakup.
Should the Grant/Baldwin comparison strike you as unfair, at least it arrives for a reason: It’s Complicated, a new romantic comedy about a middle-aged divorcee, played by Meryl Streep, falls into a genre of films known as comedies of remarriage. This genre, so-named by the philosopher and film scholar Stanley Cavell in his 1981 book The Pursuits of Happiness, describes movies about a divorced or separated couple that, over the course of the film’s topsy-turvy happenings, elect to give marriage another shot. A number of Cary Grant films, including His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and The Awful Truth, qualify. Cavell includes The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, and Adam’s Rib in the genre. More recently, there has been, according to David Edelstein, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and also the egregious Kutcher-Diaz train wreck What Happens in Vegas.
Rom-coms typically end with a fleeting scene at the altar. Comedies of remarriage begin further along, at the point of divorce, or just before it, dissect the institution and then build it back up again. The power and sweetness of this genre, at its best in the 1930s and ‘40s, is that it champions an ideal of marriage wherein relationships, and the people in them, are not necessarily perfect but always, potentially, perfectible. It celebrates a pair who have the great American virtues of stick-to-itiveness, self-effacement, big-heartedness, and a knack for self-improvement and banter (especially banter), who decide that they are better off together than they ever would be apart.
Willa Paskin Writer, pop culture junkie
Comments
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Spoiler Alert?
By: amused | Wed, 12/30/2009 - 11:13
You cannot offer an alert a mere two beats before the actual spoiler. I thought movie reviewers were long past the notion that they had some duty to reveal the end of the movie in order to discuss its significance.
Next time, offer the alert at the beginning of the article in case your readers care...and they do.
“What is a compelling choice,
By: AABre | Tue, 12/29/2009 - 14:40
“What is a compelling choice, and what makes It’s Complicated a remarriage comedy for the modern age, is that the protagonists go through the motions of matching up again but then decide (spoiler alert!) to go their separate ways.”
I didn't get the sense that the film was truly centered around remarriage, or that Jane ever seriously considers getting back together with Jack. In fact, the depiction of Jane was so refreshing considering the typical representations of women in romantic comedies, characters who get so swept up in romance that the decisions are never really theirs, but are made for them by their oh so charming and convincing male counterparts. In It’s Complicated, Jane is willing to use Jack inasmuch as he allows her, as her shrink endorses, to let loose, unwind, and simply have a good time, but I never got the sense that she ever “entertained” the affair as an opportunity to give their marriage another shot, because throughout the entire film, she very bluntly asserts that their relationship could never work again. (Even though she does explain to her friends and children that she “wondered” whether she and Jack had unfinished business.) And, she truly does mean it when she halts her affair with Jack and explains the truth to Steve Martin’s character: that she was seeing someone, but that it’s over. It is never a joint decision for Jane and Jack to “go their separate ways;” it’s Jane’s decision from the start, and, in my mind, that’s what makes this film an entirely different genre from the older “remarriage” films, and even from the typical modern romantic comedy.
Nope, Wrong.
By: Bo | Sat, 12/26/2009 - 21:10
I'm guessing that Willa's not actually seen any of these classic films that she's comparing It's Complicated to. Cuz, there's no comparison.
Yes, all those films are about divorced couples. That's the only similarity.