Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Other Man


I once tried to engage a friend in a discussion of a film we'd viewed separately.  One aspect of it both puzzled and intrigued me, and I was eager for my friend's interpretation.  His derisive response was: "For God's sake Donna, it's just a movie!

For me they're never just movies, never just a way to pass time.  They're an art form as well as entertainment, and I especially like the provocative ones. They're life on film, or someone's reflection or interpretation of life or fantasy.  

My musing on this one will be a little different, because the movie itself is different, and because I've taken James Wolcott's Cinema Purgatorio article to heart.

The truth is that no one needs another's movie critique or recommendation.  I write about movies because it pleases me, and if it interests or gives something of value to a reader, so much the better.  I'm quite certain my comments on this movie, specifically as they pertain to marriage, will be at odds with many.

 The Other Man has good actors:  Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Antonio Banderas and an impressive English actress named Romola Garai.  I chose it on DVD because of Laura Linney and the subject.  Laura Linney's heartwrenching performance in Love Letters forever established her in my mind and heart.   I'm intrigued by titles, and the simplicity and clarity of The Other Man captured my attention - ironic, because much of this movie is really about illusion: the illusion of what we believe and think we know versus truth and reality.  It's also about social and moral convention, possession and obsession.  At its core, it's about the structure that marriage superimposes on any couple's relationship; and in this film, how marriage forced moments of beauty into secrecy.

The co-screenwriter (adapting from a short story by Bernhard Schlink) and director, Richard Eyre, terms it a psychological thriller.  I think it's more a character study and marriage autopsy, wrapped in a mystery. 

We meet a lovely and successful shoe designer, Laura Linney, long married to Liam  Neeson, who we later learn owns a computer software firm, and their beautiful young-adult daughter, Romola Garai.  Their home is in pastoral, secluded English countryside, a set of buildings reached by a road that leads through graceful, sloping fields, up a gentle hill and into a compound within a partial stone wall.   Beautiful, affluent isolation.

After a fashion event, Linney meets Neeson for dinner and poses some enigmatic questions to him about attraction to others and long-term fidelity.  He's taken aback, unsettled, unwilling to address them, even in the abstract.  Instead, he seeks assurance that she's not trying to tell him something, and after receiving it, assures her of his love and faithfulness in body and heart.  The exchange is brief but significant.

Next we're wondering if she's left him because he's at home, distraught, and attempting to give her clothes to their daughter, who tries to calm and console him.

The rest of the movie follows Neeson as he's consumed by his wife's absence and obsessed with excavating the tangible remains of her life.  He stumbles upon a password-protected file on her laptop, and his journey, his war of discovery begins.  She was his, and he's entitled to know everything about her, and by God he will!  How dare she keep anything from him!  Nothing stands in his way, not his daughter, not his corporate responsibilities, not even the law.

I'll not reveal more in case you'd like to see it for yourself.  The photography is exquisite and the acting is first-rate, but I was disturbed by the husband's apparent motivation and behavior, and this is where I'll probably offend sensibilities and defy established morality.

Marriage should not be possession; it should not be ownership of a spouse's body, mind and soul, and yet for many, that's what it represents - what it comes to - and I believe it's what society intends, particularly for females.

We see this extreme sense of female possession playing out regularly in the news in the horrific killing and/or mutilation of females who attempt to leave relationships or assert themselves.  We see it again in the outrage and sense of betrayal when one spouse learns the other has shared their sexuality or emotional intimacy with someone outside the marriage.  ... You were mine!  ... You belonged to me!  Little or no attention is paid to the reasons, or to the fact that human emotions are complex and unpredictable, and that marriage didn't confer ownership.

Fearing societal and/or spousal scorn, many females live safe but restricted lives within controlling marriages, accepting their social conditioning, believing they surrendered themselves to another's control and expectations when they made their vows.  To even question it philosophically, as Linney tried to do in this film, raises insecurity, defensiveness and anger. 

This film is not about domestic violence, at least not in the usual sense.  It is about a husband irrationally consumed with learning a wife's secret that could destroy him, given his fanatical sense of matrimonial possession.

In the DVD Bonus Features, Director Richard Eyre speaks of the betrayal theme, and how we may think we know someone completely, totally, and yet be wrong.

Perhaps we don't fully know our spouses because we're afraid to, because it would threaten our own sense of "ownership", our sense of certainty, power and control, and our fragile, romantic concept of adult love that equates it with being being loved totally, completely, solely, and to the exclusion of all others.

I advocate faithfulness in marriage; in fact, it's a beautiful component of love, trust and commitment.  What I profoundly abhor is when this expectation crosses into a mindset of territorial possession.  Marriage binds and constricts the female disproportionately in our society, even today, and Neeson's obsession in this film symbolizes it.  I found his character's behavior so disturbing and morally offensive (though it won't be to everyone) that I considered hitting the stop button.  I didn't because I wanted to learn  the secret and see how the story ended.  Am I glad I finished watching?  I have mixed feelings about it.

There are plot complexities I haven't mentioned, and difficult themes that were handled well and added richness, but I found the ending bizarre and unrealistic.   Possible but improbable. 

But then it's only a movie; and for many, not worth this much reflection.