'The Story of Us': Married bliss turns calamatious

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Here's a perfectly logical question: why would we want to watch a movie about a married couple bickering and fighting with each other interminably for two hours? Why would we bother going to the cinema and paying the admission to see something like this?

In the case of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes of a Marriage, it's an absolutely fulfilling experience worth the time and the ticket price. It's an insightful look into the complexities of a marriage and how the two individuals -- sublimely played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann -- undergo it all, separately and together.

The same can't really be said about similar ventures that Hollywood has always offered us. Paul Mazursky tried to prop up Woody Allen and Bette Midler as husband and wife who endlessly quarrel and make up in Scenes from a Mall, an apparently ambitious movie that ends up being little more than an opportunity for the two comedians to ham it up ad nauseam. And Mike Nichols' Heartburn, despite its reality-based material (it's a fictionalized account of writer Nora Ephron and journalist Carl Bernstein's marriage), becomes nothing more than an onscreen shoutfest between stars Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

And yet Hollywood keeps them coming. This time it's director Rob Reiner who takes a stab at telling us about the perils of married life in his latest movie, The Story of Us. Collaborator Alan Zweibel provided the screenplay, which he wrote with writer- director Jessie Nelson, the woman responsible for the Whoopi Goldberg film Corrina, Corrina. Playing one of the lead roles is Bruce Willis, who has worked with Reiner and Zweibel before in the critical and commercial flop North.

Exactly ten years before this movie, Reiner directed When Harry Met Sally, that winsome romantic comedy about how two people go through years of their relationship before eventually marrying each other. Now, after a decade, Reiner obviously wants to tell the story of how Harry and Sally break up.

The Story of Us is the story of Ben (Willis) and Katie Jordan (Michelle Pfeiffer), a couple happily married for 15 years with two adorable kids. The film opens with the cheerful pair having a family quality time at the dinner table with 12-year-old Josh (Jake Sandvig) and 10-year-old Erin (Colleen Rennison), the night before the children go off to summer camp.

Once the kids are gone, however, the cheerfulness melts away: Ben and Katie are camouflaging the fact that they are drifting apart.

After the bus taking their children to camp drives off, Ben and Katie go their separate ways, living in separate houses. The film basically takes place between the time the children depart for summer camp and the time they arrive home. During that time, Ben and Katie go back and forth, attempting to save the marriage one minute and then trying to decide the best way to reveal the separation to their children the next.

And in lieu of straightforward, linear storytelling, Reiner, Zweibel and Nelson inject a lot of cinematic devices to portray how a marriage crumbles, how two people who once loved each other can fall out of love. The devices begin as early as the opening titles, with the words seemingly avoiding and then running after one another. Next, we have the mock interviews a la Harry Met Sally, where Ben and Katie separately speak their deepest feelings straight to the camera, and we also get the comically surreal scene where one of Ben and Katie's quarrels in bed is "accompanied" by their parents.

Truthfully, some of these devices are funny, and quite well- done. The visuals illustrating Ben and Katie's impressions of their three different marriage counselors are hilarious, and the two quick montages -- one depicting the couple's many fights and the other showing the family's moments through the years -- are masterfully filmed.

Unfortunately, the film as a whole turns out to be a tedious, pointless study of marriage, with cliches and hackneyed moments endlessly filling up the screen. Willis and Pfeiffer are adequate at playing their roles, but they never seem to do anything except engage in adenoidal shrieking and bawling. Especially Willis -- you'd think he'd get some real zest into his role from his real- life breakup from Demi Moore, but here he remains as superficial as ever.

Reiner seems to be trying hard. But he can't save a movie that falls apart thanks to the annoying overacting of Rita Wilson and himself as the couple's best friends (only the uncredited Paul Reiser shines briefly as Ben's literary agent). And it's a horrible mistake to have that ending: a contrived, most inappropriate happy ending that does nothing but ruin an already problematic movie.