Top 5 Movies About Marriage [Archive]

No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15% off. It's a Wednesday, so that means we're dropping something from the Film Spotting archive for all of you to enjoy, not just Film Spotting family members who can pick and choose from anything in the archive. Opening this weekend, it's a movie we're going to get to on next week's show, The Drama with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. Now that film is about a couple that's about to get married. We thought why not share our top five movies about marriage. This is a list, Adam, from 2019. I don't want you to spoil anything, but looking back on the titles before we share the episode, how do you feel about your picks? I feel great about it, and it was a perfect tie-in at the time. Marriage Story, the Noah Baumbach movie, was the review that did instigate this top five. I'm looking at the movies in front of us. I think we both did well. This is how good this top five is. When you have, as your number five, one of the movies I think I put on my site and sound list is one of the 10 best films of all time, or was at least in the conversation. That's how much I love that film, and we both had to sneak on Pantheon entries, including that number five film. Well, that tells you that it's going to be pretty good. I even got a movie in there that is so appropriate for this list, hence it being my number four, but is a smaller movie from a few years ago that probably not a lot of people remember, Josh? Actually, there's another one right after it at number three that more people should know and remember. Those are the kind of films we like to highlight sometimes with these top fives and try to make sure more people discover. Some big titles, but some smaller films as well on these lists. You mentioned the Pantheon. If I'm looking at this list again, we both chose movies that were already in the Pantheon, which is a no-no, essentially, right? It's supposed to be a no-no. I guess there's a special dispensation for this list. Is that what we did? Or did we just not pay attention to the rules, which sometimes happens on filmspotting? Anyway, we think these picks are valid. We hope you enjoy them from November 2019, the top five movies about marriage. I was trying to be nice. Wacko! I like your friends. I know it. I'm a warm person. I know that. I'm not one of those stiffs that you like. They know it's up in the air and boom, boom, boom, but they know it's up in the air. Jenna Rollins and Peter Falk from John Cassavetes, a woman under the influence from 1974, helping us transition into our top five this week inspired by Noah Baumbach's marriage story we are sharing our top five movies about marriage, probably setting the tone there for this list in our choices, movies where the marriage is rife with conflict. And if it wasn't rife with conflict, then it probably wouldn't be much of a story. Now, this top five is one we have done in the past. In fact, a very, very long time ago, episode 28 of the show. Long before you joined, Josh, this would have been in 2005, the first year of the show. And it was a tie in with our review of Ingmar Bergman's latest at the time, Sarah Band. It was a film that was basically a sequel 30 years later to scenes from a marriage movie that definitely had a big influence on Baumbach and marriage story. And sometimes when I look back on lists from that long ago, I can cringe a little bit at some of my choices. I don't know that there's too many top five lists that I feel like I just completely failed, but occasionally one or two choices. I think, man, so many more movies I've seen now, so much more experience, I'm so much wiser. I'd have such a better list and here I am getting a chance to make right, except I don't feel too embarrassed at all. Let me hear the choices. Yeah, so I had Kramer versus Kramer. Okay. Number five, definitely a movie about divorce. I had Husbands and Wives, the Woody Allen film at number four, Raising Arizona, the Cone Brothers film. Interesting. At number three, A Woman Under the Influence was my number two choice. That was one of the Cassavetes films I had seen before we did our recent marathon on his work. And finally, I had Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage at number one. So I think easily those first two Scenes from a Marriage and the Cassavetes need to be considered in any list of the best movies about marriage. Are you setting those all aside? So of course, I'm setting all of those aside. I have five new choices and we'll see if in 10 or 12 years I regret these choices. I don't think I will, Josh, but why don't you get us started? All right. So yeah, my first crack at this and it was hard. I mean, there are so many good options here. I think what distinguishes the five that ended up making my list, sort of the framework that helped me narrow it down, is that I have five films that for me, each reveal a certain truth, at least as I've experienced it, about marriage. So each of these have either a moment or just the whole cumulative effect is, oh, it gets this. And it gets it really right. Yeah, I had it too. The way I phrased it was what aspect or nuance of marriage does the movie offer? Yeah, so I'm looking for those truths. I'll probably talk about those for each of these picks. Now, because this is such a rich topic, these are all great movies too. So I think every movie on my list I've given four out of four stars to. So these are also just on their surface great films. At number five, well, it turns out that master Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, we did a 2014 marathon on him. He made a bunch of great movies in which marriage played a part. On Twitter, when we asked for suggestions, Timothy Sedlicek suggested 1964's Charulata, The Lonely Wife, which I love. Greg F. suggested 1963's The Big City, which I love even more. Both certainly count as marriage movies. I wouldn't be surprised if you go one of those directions, Adam. But my choice for this list is Apur Sansar, also known as The World of Opu. And it's the final installment in Ray's Opu trilogy. I am committing a violation here. You are. Let me just put this out there. I totally forgot when thinking about this list that the entire trilogy is in the pantheon. Thus ineligible. So sorry, I realized that too late. Didn't have time to switch things out and just honestly just wanted to talk again about. This is an infidelity. Apur Sansar. I'm not sure our relationship can handle. I will accept my punishment. There is though this middle section in Apur Sansar that is so exquisitely joyful and romantic. And given all of the heaviness of marriage story and a lot of these movies we're going to talk about, I just wanted something like this to include on the list. It alone almost erases all the heartache that we've otherwise seen in the Opu trilogy up to this point. And it does involve the first days of a young married couple. So Abu here is a young man played by Sumitra Chatterjee. And at the start of the film, we see him fall into this hastily arranged marriage to a wealthy young woman named Aparna, played by Sharmila Tagore. So after the wedding, they go back to his dumpy apartment in Calcutta and there's a bit of a rough start for a while, but they soon find themselves to be perfectly matched. And Ray captures this in just a lovely montage of bare bones domestic bliss. They're feeding each other, they're fanning each other. They barely are able to look at anything other than each other. And so the truth that Apur Sansar gets about marriage is a good one, a positive one. On your best days, it can feel like you're the only two people in the world. And romantic comedies try to capture that, but I can't think of any that really get that feeling quite as well as Apur Sansar. So that is my number five violation or not. Yeah, you got to this top five list first. You pointed out your list in our Slack over the weekend and I was very angry with you because you had a couple choices that would have been strong contenders for me. I hadn't started formulating my list yet and I had completely forgotten about the pantheon and just thought, how am I going to do this list without the role of Opu? I mean, it's not just one of my favorite movies about marriage. It's one of my favorite movies ever, but I'm going to let you have it. And as you said, it makes it easier when Ray made at least one other masterpiece about marriage. We will get to that in a little bit. I think I was in a similar frame of mind as you, Josh, with my number five. I wanted at least one film that was going to be a little bit lighter, a little bit more joyful. And my pick is The Thin Man from 1934, Nick and Nora Charles, the couple. It was part of our screwball comedy marathon back in 2006. And it's funny because I had to do the setup for Sam at the time for that review. And I noted that it was a popular choice among listeners in connection to the top five drinking movies we did on episode 86. But it also would have been a good candidate for top five screen duos, which we did on episode 22. A case could even be made that Nick Charles belonged on the list we did on episode 34, which was our top five badasses. And now I wonder, well, why can't I put Nora Charles on the bad ass list? Doesn't have to be just Nick. She's a bad ass herself. And finally, it could have been on our top five movies about marriage on episode 28. And I actually asked Sam how bad he felt about having not seen this movie before forming all these lists. It turned out we both were big fans of this film. And this is my shot to revise history, I guess. I did focus for the rest of my picks on movies that are about marriage. And this is a detective story. But when you think about The Thin Man, do you really think about the detective story, which is about a missing inventor and this husband and wife team that almost get killed trying to find him? No, you think about the relationship. You think about Nick and Nora Charles, and you think about them equally. And that's the key nuance here was this notion of equality in a relationship, true equality and alchemy. That sense of chemistry, that intangible thing where you have two people who come together and become true partners. And of course, they're partners in trying to solve this case as well. But every other choice on my list, Josh, you're going to see films that deal with the harsher realities of even semi or mostly successful marriages, the complexities of human relationships that also are personal contracts. And I did want one that was just full blown fun, but also showcased an ideal marriage, even if it's a full blown fantasy, which I do think is what we get here with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora, two of my favorite lines from this film that get at the core of what I love about their relationship. Early in the film, I think it's maybe in that opening scene, Nora shows up and says, how many drinks have you had? And he says, this will make six martinis and she turns to the waiter and says, all right, will you bring me five more martinis, Leo? Line them up right here. If that's what he's having, that's what she's going to have by God too. And then later they're talking to a lieutenant who says, you got a pistol permit. Nick says, no, he says, ever heard of the Soul of an Act? And Nora says, oh, that's all right, we're married. I mean, that's that's that screwball comedy banter that makes these films and this film in particular such a treat. I actually came across an article from September 2011 in the National Post, the Canadian newspaper. I don't know what the point of the article was, honestly, even after reading it, but it was about Nick and Nora Charles. And it was called Nick and Nora's Infinite Marriage. And I'm not shocked at all to find, at least according to this article, that people were so convinced, fans of these films were so convinced that William Powell and Myrna Loy were really a couple, that they were sure that they were married in real life, that they had to be in a relationship with each other. And it turns out, of course, that it's that it was a purely professional relationship. So that's the reality. They weren't really a couple at all. The movie gives us the fantasy version of marriage. And that's what I love about the thin men. Pretty girl. Yeah, she's a very nice type. You got types? Only you, Lanky Burnett's with wicked jaws. So it sounds like those were our sunny picks and it's time to move into choppier waters. Yeah. Number four, I have away from her. And every year that I get older, the more astonished I am at just the wisdom that Sarah Polly showed in her writing, directing debut. I think she was age 27 at this point. And it is true. She's adapting here a great short story by Alice Munro. The Bear came over the mountain and she's also working with two seasoned actors, Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsett. But still, this is a film of deep knowingness from someone who you would still think had a lot to experience yet. Christie and Pinsett play a couple whose 45 year marriage has settled into a comfortable and tender intimacy. Despite certain troubles we learn about that they did endure in the past. Then Fiona, the wife begins to show symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And in addition, just to the medical challenges, these troubles also revisit in disturbing new ways. And just up by end, what the two of them thought was this settled life that they had together. Now this did make my list of top five female directed debuts in November 2017. So if you want to hear more on the film itself, that's episode 657. But the truth that this movie gets at for this list, and again it's one that was corralled by a 20-something who's working with great material and collaborators. The truth is that marriage is never going to get easy. You're not going to get to that point. It might in fact be the hardest thing you ever do. Yet part of what it means to be married is to keep doing that work all the way through to the end. Underneath all the complications that away from her captures, there are past betrayals, there's the disease, there's aging itself. It still recognizes this truth, I think, especially near the end. After Fiona has moved into a memory care facility and she begins to drift further and further away from grant. There's a sequence where there's this one moment of awful but at the same time sort of wonderful clarity. You could have just driven away. Just driven away without a care in the world. And forsook me. Forsaken me. Forsaken. Not a chance. I'm pretty sure we played that clip before, but I wish I hadn't because it's really even more fitting for this list. And it's always worth hearing Christie's delivery there. So away from her, my number four, don't wait for marriage to get easy. I don't know that that day ever comes. Yeah, that is a great pick. I love that film and I love those performances. My number four, I'm going to be very brief here because it's a film that even though it came out in 2014, I still feel like not enough people have seen and to get into the weeds too much on it would really ruin the experience. And maybe after listening to this top five list, people will be curious to check out this film. I think it was the debut film from director Charlie McDowell and I know that I like this movie more than you did. Though I feel like you were favorable on it too. The one I love. The one I love from, as I said, 2014 starring Mark DuPlas and Elizabeth Moss as a couple who are going through a rough patch. They're kind of trying to recapture some of their past glory and their more passionate times and they're seeing a therapist who's played by Ted Danson. And he suggests they go to this weekend getaway and have some fun, hopefully, and maybe reignite this passion that has gone a little bit dormant. And here's the truth. I'm really not going to say more than that. That's the basic plot. That's all you need to go going in. They go to the house and some really strange things start to happen. That was a little bit of a weird fight last night. I know. I don't really understand what happened, but I feel like maybe we just talk it up to like some bad pot, alcohol combo, put it behind us and not let it ruin the trip. Agreed. Totally. Cool. That being said, it was one of the weirder fights we've had. Oh my god, I know. Crazy, right? I still don't fully understand whether you were so drunk and stoned that you thought we had sex or were you just making a joke and it backfired. Honestly, I think it was just one of those things. You know, one of those things. And when you come out of that film, I said this when we talked about it on the show, I said it in my letterbox review at the time. If you watch that film with your significant other as I did, whether you're married or not, if you have been together for any amount of time, I imagine that the person you watch it with will turn to you just as my wife did and say, Okay, so what's the best version of me? They will ask that question or some form of that question after seeing this film. And I could probably give you the advice to not take the bait and don't answer that question. But if you want to have a really, I suppose, honest and interesting conversation with your spouse, you could try to answer that question because the truth there, the fundamental truth there is no matter how happy your marriage is, no matter how much you do genuinely love that other person, there are going to be imperfections. There are going to be quote unquote flaws. There are going to be things that you probably wish you could change about them. You may discover new ones as you go through the marriage and whether or not you ever feel like those are things you need to bring out into the open, or those are things that are forced out into the open. That's different for every couple. It's not really just a secret that you take to your grave, but in this case, the one I love, it's a film that really forces you to not only, I would say, Josh, think about it in terms of your spouse, but think about it. I think the way Sarah did, which if you're really connecting with the material, the way I did, you're not going, Wow, what would I change about Sarah? I'm going, What would Sarah change about me? What should Sarah want to change about me? How do I need to be better? So the one I love may be a little bit of a surprise choice here, but a movie at least on this topic of marriage, I found pretty profound. Yeah, overall, I didn't go for the movie, but I did note that it gets at a truth very similar to what you were just saying. Basically, the gap between the spouse we want to be and the spouse we are can feel huge, right? So I do think the movie touches on that for sure. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-CD's chakras, reached the pinnacle, stung by the sneaker, I've fallen down again. Yeah, I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Okay, so we are up to number three. If marriage, as I said with, away from her is never going to get easy, if it's going to be a series of ups and downs, then the good ones are going to have to involve reconciliation. And one of the most delightful movies about a married couple making up is 1937's The Awful Truth. This stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunn as Jerry and Lucy Warrener, a husband and wife who, like the couple we meet in marriage story, are in the process of divorce. There are essentially two movies going on here. There's the one where Lucy and Jerry are trying to find new partners while simultaneously sabotaging each other's efforts at romance. And then there's the one where Lucy and Jerry continue to share glances, inside jokes, instinctual smiles before they remember they're not supposed to be smiling at each other. Basically, no matter who else is around, they're always the most compatible couple in the room. Now, the director, Leo McCary, he stages a really brilliant comic sequence near the end that I wanted to highlight and why I wanted to put this on the list. This is when Lucy and Jerry, for these really convoluted plot reasons, they have to stay in the same country house in adjoining rooms on the night that their divorce will be finalized at midnight. Once they're settled in their beds, the door between these two rooms, it keeps opening, like the wind does it and then there's this cat, all sorts of stuff comes into play and each time it happens, they have a clear sight line of the other person just sitting there in their bed. So there's a lot of comic business about this where they try and fail to keep the door closed. Eventually, they just realize they're going to have to connect with each other on some level and this leads to, here's another speaking of the man, great screwball exchange that hints at reconciliation. You're all confused, aren't you? Aren't you? No. Well, you should be because you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool, but I'm not now. So long as I'm different, don't you think that, well, maybe things could be the same again, only a little different, huh? You mean that, Jerry? Vina Del Mar doing the screenplay there. She's adapting a play by Arthur Richmond and basically the simple truth here, marriage means making up. In a way, marriage doesn't become a marriage until you've hit brokenness of some kind and have, by some grace, been able to make it to the other side. I think the awful truth is this great farce about somewhat begrudgingly making it to the other side. And these two being surprised to find themselves there, but also just really sort of overjoyed with it as well. So I guess you could see this as a positive pick, too. For sure. Yeah. No, Good Pick, a movie that was also part of our screwball comedy marathon back in 2006. My number three choice would be a great pairing with your number four. You talk about a couple that hopes or imagines that they are absolutely in that settling part of their marriage, where their life is what it is and it is joyful enough. And they believe there is a firm foundation and that foundation gets rocked a little bit by a revelation. It's the movie that was my number three film of 2015, Andrew Hague's 45 Years. And I'm sure this was discussed by people who talked about the movie at the time. It's fascinating to see this for what it was, which was a follow up to his debut film, a movie we liked a lot called Weekend, which was about two gay men who meet and have this kind of fling and this connection. And then they go their separate ways. It's a relationship that never gets to have a history, at least a history that we're going to see. And then we come to 45 Years, a movie that is all about that history. And the truth for me that it really showcases is the way a marriage can have that kind of quiet comfort that two people can have together. But there being some cracks and cracks that can potentially develop into fractures. And it's not by accident that I use words like crack and fracture because that's kind of integral to the plot. You've got Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney as the husband and wife, and they are supposed to be celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter arrives that says a body has been found from his past from over 45 years ago. The woman that he was madly in love with before he met his wife, Kate, and they were on a trip together hiking somewhere and she fell between a glacier and obviously died. Her body was never found. They have now recovered it and just that body. It's almost honestly like a ghost story in a way where now this body comes up and hurts them. And they have to relive and revisit some choices that were made before they even knew each other and then things that are sort of kept secret throughout their marriage. And I think that's a number of devastating scenes in this movie at our end of the year rap party. I talked about a slideshow scene in the attic that I thought was a scene of the year candidate, a music moment from the end of the film. Hey, takes a very subtle approach here. It's a two-hander. It's these two people doing a lot of talking and doing a lot of talking within the space of this home that they have made together. You get a lot of kind of simple, longer takes lingering with this couple, but there is just one cut in it that really floors me. It's when they're in the living room, they're sitting down, separate parts of the room and she's reading and he comes and kind of curiously sits down right next to her. And Tom Courtney looks at her very hard for a second and she says, what? What is it? And he clearly has something to say and he says that he doesn't. And then you hear his voice, even though his mouth isn't moving, you hear his voice say, there's something I want to tell you. And we're seeing them in profile. He's clearly not talking. We hear that voice. It turns out that we then cut to another angle and that audio is just a bridge to him finally starting to say whatever it is he had to say. You don't know in that moment how much time has actually passed. Have they been sitting there for 10 seconds together or 10 minutes? Or an hour. You really don't know how long it took him to kind of build up the courage to finally say what he has to say. That's something I want to tell you. Okay. You know, I feel sure I've told you before, but it was a long time ago, so I could be wrong. Okay, go on. Yeah. I was her next of kin. What do you mean? Officially, I was her next of kin. I'm sure I told you this before. I think I remember her husband being another woman's next of kin. Why? Why what? Why were you her next of kin? Because they thought we were married. Who did? The authorities, people. What made them think that? We told them we were. There's something about that really efficient use of ellipsis there that seems so appropriate to the film, which as I said is about the past encroaching on the present and possibly affecting their future. And another true moment there in any relationship, there being some secret. There being something that one person doesn't want to tell the other person, but knows they really have to. And they don't want to do it under the guise of wanting to protect her when really selfishly you're protecting yourself, which is what he's doing there, I think. And these are the type of dramas that are playing out in households everywhere, every day and will forever. Yeah, you're right. That would make a really great pairing with away from her. Just the way it recognizes this sort of tranquil domesticity should never be taken for granted. That's maybe when those cracks start to turn into fault lines or something bigger. Okay, I'm at number two on my list. I won't spend a lot of time on this because I did go with Eyes Wide Shut, which we just spent so much time talking about as part of our 9 from 99 series. I wouldn't say this movie is anti-marriage, but it's in a lot of ways it's pro-marriage. But it's certainly the movie that's honest about the difficulties of marriage. And the reality that marriages fail for all sorts of reasons, that sometimes the right call might be the hard one of deciding not to stay together. The couple here, of course, Bill and Alice, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, they really find themselves at this point early on in the film. It kicks off the entire rest of the movie, this late night conversation that threatens to peel away some of the masks that they've been wearing for each other. So this is, you know, they're at this point well before Bill throws a fit and decides to go sneak into a creepy sex party. They have some issues, fair to say. Now, you might point out that after all this craziness, Bill and Alice still seem to be moving themselves towards some sort of reconciliation by the end of the film. I think that's true, but as I noted in our review, and we did spend a lot of time talking about marriage in that review, it's worth noting if listeners haven't checked that out yet. But as I noted there is that they've still got a lot of work to do at that toy store in that final scene when they get home. The reality is they might not make it. I mean, my instinct coming out of Eyes Wide Shut is, you know, you breathe a sigh of relief, but the more you think about it and realize what they have ahead of them and where they're at, I mean, this is a downer pick in a lot of ways because the truth is that you might not make it. It's just a sad reality. I totally get that reading or suggesting that it could be read that way, and I see it so much more hopeful. I see it as they finally come through it, and now that they have been forced to confront reality, actual reality, the honesty of each person's viewpoint and I suppose mindset of their marriage, I think it's going to lead them to better things. That's my hope. They're definitely in a better place, for sure. Still got a ways to go. Yeah. So my number two does go back to Satya Jitre. You mentioned the film. It is the big city from 1963. I love this film. What a great filmmaker. And the truth of marriage that we're seeing explored here, I think, is what can happen? The upheaval and the angst that can happen when you have a marriage that's in transition. When one partner decides to break from their assigned role in the relationship and all the drama that can unfold from that, this film stars Madhavi Mukherjee as Arati and her husband Subrata is played by Anil Chatterjee. And we talked about this a lot during our marathon and this review, the movie. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through this sub-credits, Chakka. Reach the pinnacle, stung by the snake and I've fallen down again. Yeah. I am not writing actively anymore and when I see my old work it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachow on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty. Stay for the fire. Forces us to think about what her role, what Arati's role is as a woman in their household. Within their marriage, she's a wife, she's a mother, she's a daughter-in-law, she's a sister-in-law, she's a housekeeper, she's a cook, she's a nurse. She's all of these things and we see the toll that all of those roles take on her and they all have prescribed actions and needs that come with it. And because of his struggles, her husband not making the money that he should and they're having trouble making ends meet, she discovers that she could work outside the home, that she could go make some money as well and she does that. She goes to work as a saleswoman and actually has some success. So now we see her take on new roles as an employee, as a co-worker, as a friend and actually a supervisor and the big one that causes so much trouble at home as the breadwinner. And she's trying to navigate all these while also navigating all those other roles. She can't just abandon them and these new ones don't have the history, the decades and centuries of history that tell you what type of housewife you're supposed to be in this culture, what type of housekeeper or daughter-in-law you're supposed to be. She's making all this up as she goes, which is both what makes it so thrilling and what makes it so hard. I mentioned she becomes the breadwinner. There's a scene where she tells her husband that she's gotten a raise and at least the English translation that we get on screen in the subtitles is great. The wife comes home a hero, the husband's zero. That's how he feels. He feels completely worthless now because of her new role and she's enjoying her work. She is successful and she's being useful to the family and she loves that and his kind of self-pity and despondency really does hurt her. And there are a couple of scenes, Josh, that I know you remember well from this movie that really get to the heart of this. And it's a fairly early one after coming home from the job and she's just kind of recounting her routine, the details of the job very casually to her husband. And she says, you wouldn't recognize me on the job. And that piques his interest and he says, what about at home? Would I recognize you at home? And Mukherjee, just what a performance. Very slyly, almost sensually, slowly approaches him, enters the frame that's just on his face, sharing that very close space with him. It's a very intimate exchange and very close to him and very quietly says, you don't recognize me? And she brings up the mole on her face that of course he knows. And when he says that it feels all familiar, she points out that she's still the same housewife. She does reassure him here in that moment. Now later when he's found the lipstick that she has put on to go out on her job as a saleswoman, something she's never used before, he gets a jab in at her. He doesn't even look at her as she's heading out the door. He says, you're not going to put on your lipstick. And this moment is so good. She throws the lipstick out the window. She doesn't need it. And she says, listen to me, do what you like, but please don't misunderstand me, darling. So it's at once sensitive. It's a plea to him, but it's emphatic and also defiant at the same time. It's an order. It's her telling her husband, don't misunderstand me. You can think what you want, but don't ever question my feelings for you or my loyalty to you and this family. Basically, don't ever do that again. It's what she says to her husband here and rewatching scenes from this. It's available on the Criterion channel. I almost didn't stop. I almost didn't get this list done just because I started rewatching the big city. It's that good. Yeah, that scene with a lipstick was my choice for most moving moment in the marathon. And I just can't recommend that marathon highly enough if we have relatively new listeners who didn't have a chance to go through those films with us. I think we probably both assumed we were going to encounter a masterpiece with the O'Poo trilogy. Right. But we saw, you know, the big city, I would consider another one. Me too. And really almost every film in it was just unbelievable. So I'm glad that we have two rey. I think it's very appropriate to have two rey picks for this list. I'm at my number one, which is Sunrise, a song of two humans. I'm going to end with the best film to my mind on my list. I mean, this one is on my list of the best of all time. And it probably holds the simplest truth for me. Date night. You may want to kill your wife at some point. No, no. Now where you're going? Date night is always a good idea, Adam. Yes. Always a good idea. This is F.W. Mernows, 1927 silent masterpiece. And yes, it begins with a portrait of marriage that's probably darker than Eyes Wide Shut, I would say. We have country man, George O'Brien, persuaded by a seductive city woman to murder his wife, played by Oscar winner Janet Gaynor. Spoiler alert, at the last minute his conscience gets the better of him. Rather than throw her over the boat they're in, he paddles across the lake to the city, where his wife understandably flees. And then comes the movie's miracle. After finding his wife again, he repeatedly pleads for forgiveness as they walk around the city together, ever so slowly she gives him another chance. There's this point where they are walking together, they stop at a church and they watch a wedding that's taking place. And this causes the husband to tearfully renew his vows. And Mernow stages the sequence so brilliantly because he shifts things so that the marriage ceremony taking place suddenly becomes their ceremony, right? They emerge from the church just as the bells are ringing, for example. And then what follows is this second honeymoon, essentially in the city, as the husband and wife, they celebrate their reunion by having their photograph taken, they dance at a fair. And Mernow captures all of this with a camera that's just radically free for its time. I mean, it's really astonishing when you think about it in the historical context. So, yeah, don't wait for attempted murder to get you out of the house, Adam. Go on a date night just for the heck of it. Sunrise, my number one movie about marriage. It's an amazing film and it's one that I was telling my wife was your number one as we were driving home from marriage story. And she asked me what it was about and I gave her the synopsis to my best recollection. She thinks I've been saved. And she thinks you're a crazy person. Did she get in touch with Debbie immediately? Like, are you okay? Maybe. All right, my number one, you had to know it was coming and here's my great indiscretion, Josh. I was so ready to pounce on you. I was going to pull out the whole Lebowski. This is not nom. There are rules. You can't be breaking the rules by going with your panty on movies for your list, even though I was the last person to do it completely unintentionally. But I put apocalypse an hour or something in the top five forgetting it was in the pantheon maybe last year. So I couldn't really give you grief without being a total hypocrite. And then guess what? I go and do. I discover an hour or two before we sit down to record that my number one, of course, is also in the pantheon. You know, it would be great if we had on our website a page that listed the movies in the pantheon. We should do that. Let's do that. Yeah, let's do that. We're morons is the lesson here. But you know what? I'm going to stand by it because any list that's about the best movies about marriage needs the role of oppu on it. And I think it needs before midnight, the third film in link. Later is before trilogy, another trilogy. There you go, Josh, all three of the films from each trilogy are in our pantheon. And if you follow film spotting on Twitter or maybe even if you don't, you may know that my Ethan Hawke tweet, a quote from my interview with him last year for the movie blaze. You're famous. It went viral. It went, you know, I'm not bragging, but it semi viral anyway. Big numbers for a film spotting tweet, let's say, and it was all about his great bit of wisdom about how dads shouldn't be worried about their daughter's sexuality and don't be the dad with the shotgun. Let them be their own shotgun and let them make mistakes. It was great stuff. And the context of that answer, though, was really just a kind of dumb question for me about whether or not my daughter Sophie, who was 14 at the time, was ready to watch before sunrise. And since that time, since that interview, Sophie has seen before sunrise. She's seen it a lot. She's obsessed with the movie, Josh, as you know, and she's so enamored with it that she's not sure she wants to watch even before sunset. She knows its reputation. She knows people like me love it, maybe even love it more than sunrise, which she can't comprehend. But her attitude is before sunrise is perfect. Why mess with it? I don't want to know what happens to them. I think that's probably how a lot of us felt until we saw sunset. And then we thought, OK, well, somehow that movie's perfect, too. So she's resistant. I've always said, you know, it's only a matter of time. We're going to watch it. You have to see it. But you know what I haven't decided? What's always been in the back of my mind? Whether or not I'm going to have her watch before midnight. Whether or not that's going to follow. I don't know if you should do it to her, not because it's a bad film. No, exactly. Or whether or not we're both just going to live in denial about it actually being a trilogy. There isn't a third film here, Sophie. It is more adult. Sure, I could argue that as a 15 year old, maybe she's not ready for it. It's harsher. It's more cynical. But mainly, I think I'm just protecting her from seeing what happens to Jesse and Celine. From letting her see what can happen to love as instructive as it may actually be. I started this top five with fantasy, the thin man. And I think we come down here with the bookend of the reality of before midnight. Oh, f***. You know something, you're just like the little girls in everybody else. You want to live inside some fairy tale, alright? I'm just trying to make things better here. Alright, I tell you that I love you unconditionally. I tell you that you're beautiful. I tell you that your ass looks great when you're 80. I'm trying to make you laugh. Okay. Alright, I put up with plenty of your s***. And if you think I'm just some dog that's going to keep coming back, then you're wrong. But if you want true love, then this is it. This is real life. It's not perfect, but it's real. And if you can't see it, then you're blind. Alright, if I give up. The key there from the end of before midnight is Jesse saying true love and pointing out that true love is not necessarily what we think of as the fantasy or the storybook version. It's not perfect. The fundamental nature of true love is that it's imperfect and it's hard. And I did find a great article, A. O. Scott, great critic from The New York Times, of course, wrote an article after this movie came out where he tied it into a few other movies, including Amor, the Michael Hanukkah film. And the headline of the article was Marriage the Job. And he said this, There's a flirtation that began 18 years before on a train to Vienna and resumed in Paris. A prickly and contentious meaning of minds and hearts has hardened into a power struggle. And the negotiation of power is what gives substance to modern marriage stories, whether comic or dramatic. I do think that's the fundamental truth here, that any relationship, certainly a marriage, is on some level about power, whether you mean it to or not, certainly not in kind of the corporate takeover sense of it, but it's a negotiation. Someone in a relationship is going to have to give. And this is what we see in marriage story. You talked about it with Nicole's character saying she got smaller. Someone else is going to potentially or at times going to have to thrive for the relationship to work. And someone is going to have to sacrifice. They're going to have to give just a little bit of themselves. And that's, that's the work of marriage. That's the trick ultimately of marriage that before midnight after certainly a lot of contentiousness and a lot of prickliness eventually does come around to. Well, as for the question whether or not Sophie should watch it, you're just going to have to get in touch with your personal doctor Spock, give Ethan Hawke, call, text him and see if he thinks she should watch it or not. You know he'll say, of course. Well, there you go. Stop protecting her. There you go. It's just me being one of the dads protecting my daughter's innocence. She needs to see what the world's really like. You have your answer. Okay. If we're meeting for the first time today on a train, would you start talking to me? Would you ask me to get off the train with you? Of course. Josh and I have between us a combined 127 years of marriage. So that top five should have been a very good one. That's an exaggeration, but you didn't really need to. You didn't really need to exaggerate to shock people. I know, I know that was an enjoyable top five for us. Hopefully it was for you as well. And yes, if you're a film spotting family member, you can dip into the archive and listen to top fives like that anytime you would like. It's one of the benefits along with bonus shows, a weekly newsletter, early access to events, being part of the film's early access to events, being part of the film spotting family discord, and a lot more to join. Check out the info at filmspottingfamily.com. Thanks for listening. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. For a son who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the puja bhajjo on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire.