Shots in the dark: if you think breaking up is hard to do, try making a movie about it

Interview, August, 2003 by Graham Fuller

"Hurts, doesn't it?" Tom Waits growls in One From the Heart (1982), mocking the despair of the potbellied mechanic played by Fredric Forrest as he contemplates the decision of his girlfriend (TerGarr) to run off with a waiter. When they leave, lovers and spouses annihilate their partners' self-esteem, an amatory equivalent of the scorchedearth policy. Singers from Billie Holiday to Alanis Morissette, from Johnnie Ray to Bryan Ferry, from Morrissey to Eminem (and everyone in between) have expressed this better than any movie I can name. Although the death knell of love resounds in most lives, the spectacle of following somebody's grieving ex around for nearly two hours has held much less appeal for filmmakers than has love's golden dawn.

If no current star has had the opportunity to match Humphrey Bogart's self-pity in Casablanca (1942), Kirsten Dunst--seduced and abandoned in The Virgin Suicides (2000)-could be our next Lady of the Dolorous Countenance. But where are the cinematic equivalents of artist Tracey Emin's unmade bed with its detritus of rejection? Where in the movies are the tear-drenched pillows, the sudden crying jags on the subway? When are we next going to see a scene with the force of the discarded wife (Jill Clayburgh) throwing up in An Unmarried Woman (1978)? Bridget Jones' simpering doesn't cut it for me.

The pain of the unwanted informs three more movies opening this month--Alan Rudolph's The Secret Lives of Dentists, Shane Meadows Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, and James Ivory's Le Divorce. Based on a Jane Smiley novella, Rudolph's grueling drama--replete with dental metaphors--stars Campbell Scott and Hope Davis as Dave and Dana, married dentists with three small daughters and an inability to communicate. Believing Dana is sleeping with the conductor at her amateur opera company, the cerebral Dave struggles to sustain the illusion of normality even as his alter ego (Denis Leary as a disgruntled patient) ridicules him.

As Dave succumbs to the virulent strain of influenza that poleaxes his family, and strives to cope with domestic mess, he hallucinates that Dana is having sex all over the place. His increasingly lurid reveries, redolent of disintegration, disrupt the movie itself, in keeping with Rudolph's jazzy aesthetic. That Dave finds out how his future will unfold without being allowed a complete catharsis is truthful-yet infuriating for the viewer. A life lived under emotional novocaine is no life at all.

More in touch with his desperate feelings is the likeable goofball played by Rhys Ifans in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, a spaghetti-western spoof set in a working-class English suburb. Ifans' physical ungainliness suits the frantic behavior of his distraught, car-crashing garage boss, who must win back his live-in girlfriend (Shirley Henderson) after her 12-year-old daughter's long-absent father, a dangerously vulpine Scottish crook (Robert Carlyle), comes calling.

We can feel the Ifans character's agony--no matter that this is the least poignant of Meadows' films. It hurtles, entertainingly enough, toward the conclusion that a sweet breadwinner is preferable to a virile abuser. Even josef von Stern berg, whose films sardonically celebrated the primacy of the erotic image, settled for that placebo in Blonde Venus (1932).

In Le Divorce, two Californian sisters in Paris must deal with French male inconstancy, clannishness, and financial pragmatism. Poet Roxy (Naomi Watts) is about to have her second child when her husband (Melvil Poupaud), the feckless scion of an upper-class Gallic dynasty, takes off with a Russian temptress; Isabel (Kate Hudson), helping Roxy through her pregnancy, matter-of-factly becomes the latest mistress of the dynasty's elegant roue (Thierry Lhermitte)..

Ivory's urbane comedy of manners, adapted from Diane Johnson's novel, is more concerned with the (recently widened) Franco-Amenican divide than with romantic anguish. Savoring Frenchness, it mulls over the mysteries of chauvinistic marital laws, table wines, lingerie, scarves, and nouvelle cuisine--Isabel serving herself up as creme brulee to her older lover.

The prolonged feud between the French family and the Yanks over the destiny of a talismanic heirloom--a painting, possibly a Georges de La Tour--squeezes emotion from the movie. Though we register Roxy's hurt over her husband's flight, her suicide attempt comes out of the blue; a subplot involving the Russian adulteress's crazed husband (Matthew Modine) is more wrenching. Isabel's sad, philosophical response to the end of her relationship strikes the right note of romantic ennui-she's a more mature woman than the lovelorn groupie Hudson played in Almost Famous (2000). And, like Bogart in Casablanca, she'll always have Paris.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.