Reinventing the Formula of the Failed Marriage Movie

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The failed marriage movie has been a staple of Oscar bait cinema for a long time. The quintessential example is the aptly titled Marriage Story (2019), which features Adam Driver and Scarlet Johansson giving very loud performances as a couple in the throes of a nasty divorce. She’s an actress; he’s a director. He doesn’t appreciate her talent. The story plays out predictably, full of dramatic confrontations and arguments—and one comically intense argument—as the couple rehashes the reasons their marriage fell apart in the first place.

Marriage Story belongs to a category of movies—let’s simply call them failed marriage movies—that too often follow repetitive formulas that should be relatable but end up feeling slightly stale. Think also of Blue Valentine (2010), starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, which also offers a sequence of depressing arguments interspersed with flashbacks to the golden early years of a relationship. But occasionally a failed marriage movie taps into something more tonally interesting. Compare Marriage Story or Blue Valentine to Revolutionary Road (2008), which came out more than a decade earlier. All three films explore the disintegration of a relationship between two people who once loved each other very much. But Revolutionary Road, in addition to being the most visually impressive of the three, also has a psychological ominousness that pervades every scene.

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Revolutionary Road follows 1950s couple April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) Wheeler, whose romance has gone sour after two children and many years living in an idyllic suburban home. There to put pressure on the decaying relationship is the son of the Wheelers’ realtor Helen, John (Michael Shannon), who has recently been released from an insane asylum—in one brilliant scene, where Helen brings John to the Wheelers’ home for dinner, John’s flouting of social norms allows him to look past the surface of the Wheelers’ suburban life and target the rotten center of their marriage. He calls out what the Wheelers are too afraid to admit to themselves: that their marriage is functionally dead, that Frank is insecure in his identity and masculinity, and that April brings out the worst in him.

The movie is about a failing relationship, but it’s also about the horrors concealed beneath the placid surface of suburbia and the flaws of marriage as an institution when aligned with traditional gender roles. The tension between Frank and April develops in part because they end up trapped in rigid lifestyles that neither are happy with. Frank takes the train into the city to work a job that he loathes so that April can stay home and slowly suffocate in their picture perfect suburban house. Only John, a character who exists somewhat outside of social norms, is capable of seeing their life for the hellscape that it is. As the movie progresses, the flat, bright lighting that seeps into the house begins to feel oppressive. There’s an unnerving languidness to every scene that’s broken only by Frank and April’s cruel and brutal arguments. They fight not only to take out their frustration on each other, but also to break out of the awful sameness and homogeneity that makes all of their days blend together.

Revolutionary Road adds an eerie dimension to the failed marriage movie formula by expanding its ambition beyond the predictable beats of a broken relationship. Other successful movies also riff on the formula by bending genre and tone. David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014), based on the bestselling novel of Gillian Flynn, is a thriller with some wonderfully black comedic undertones, but its heart is the warped and twisted marriage between Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) Dunne, who are two different kinds of horrible people. Nick is a sleazy loser who has affairs and frequently relies on the help of his well-intentioned sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Amy is a straight-up sociopath who, in the film’s defining midpoint twist, has attempted to orchestrate her own death in order to frame Nick and destroy his life.

Where Revolutionary Road gives a familiar story a hint of psychological horror, Gone Girl challenges the viewer to find something relatable in the skeleton of a murder mystery. The film takes the mundane issues that often appear in a failing marriage—for instance, the realization that after marrying someone you may one day realize that they’re not the person you thought they were at all—and distorts them in gruesome ways. When Amy first goes missing at the beginning of the film, Nick is desperate to find her. But as the search continues and he discovers her malevolent intentions, he realizes that the real challenge will be escaping the trap she’s set for him. Amy’s plan to frame Nick for her murder, as sadistic as it may be, is also a wild bid out of a marriage that feels like a prison to her. Like the Wheelers, the Dunnes are also trapped in an unhappy relationship, only they’re constricted less by societal standards than by their own character flaws, and, in Amy’s case, repressed sadistic tendencies.

Revolutionary Road and Gone Girl are cynical about marriage as a concept, demonstrating how marriage traps its characters, suffocates them, and leaves them disappointed. Cynicism can be interesting and even useful in turning a basic premise into a larger commentary on the struggle to maintain a lifelong commitment to another person. But cynicism isn’t the only way to approach this kind of movie, or at least, there’s a way to balance the hopelessness of a crumbling relationship with a more earnest perspective on what could have been.

A Separation (2011), an Iranian film directed by Asghar Farhadi and winner of the 2012 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, begins in a standard way for a failed marriage movie: Siman (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Payman Maadi) sit before a judge as Siman explains why she wants to separate. She wants to move abroad. If she wants to go, Nader explains, he won’t stop her, but he refuses to come because he needs to care for his father (Ali Asghar Shahbazi), who has Alzheimer’s. He also refuses to relinquish custody of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi).

But a crisis involving a housekeeper named Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who Nader hires to take care of his father when Siman moves out, soon takes the film in an unexpected direction. There are few scenes between Siman and Nader; most of the film tracks the fallout of an intensely personal conflict between Nader, Razieh, and Razieh’s husband Hojjat (Shahab Hosseini). But it’s around this conflict—which involves a sudden miscarriage—that some of the issues in Nader and Siman’s relationship become clear. There’s the complication of Nader’s father, who’s lost most of his mental capacity and rarely speaks but still asks for Siman repeatedly after she’s gone. There’s Termeh, who is asked to choose between her parents. There’s a conversation between Termeh and Siman, perhaps the most revealing of the film, where Siman sadly tells her daughter she doesn’t really want to leave Nader—what she wants is for him to ask her to stay.

A Separation is a sad movie, but it’s sad in a different way than Revolutionary Road, where the failure of the marriage seems inevitable. Siman and Nader still care about each other. But Nader’s response to the crisis with Razieh shows that he is too stubborn and caught up in himself to fight for the relationship. The final shot of the two of them standing on opposite sides of a hallway, divided by the flow people, as Siman looks at Nader and Nader looks away, says everything that needs to be said.

What makes movies like Revolutionary Road, Gone Girl, and A Separation interesting takes on the failed marriage premise is their willingness to stretch and challenge the classic formula by getting at something deeper than the relationship itself, or by approaching the relationship in an unexpected way. A Separation, for example, doesn’t feel the need to tell the audience everything about Siman and Nader’s marriage, instead allowing aspects to come to light as the characters respond to a sudden crisis involving another marriage. Disintegrating marriage stories get their universal appeal from the potential to explore one of the saddest failures of connection. But their familiarity is also a weakness, which is why the best examples of the category reinvent what is essentially a mundane story and make it new, horrifying, and painful all over again.