Triple Feature: Revolutionary Road, Open Road, Paper Heart

On the scroll down of the blog there is a picture of Marie and I from when we were first dating. The light and joy in our faces shines out of the picture. The endorphins and serotonins were flowing. I felt confident and strong and desired. We were on the boardwalk of Fisherman's Wharf and the sun was setting over Golden Gate Bridge. We were in love, hopeful, energized, charged with optimism, crazy for each other.

The beginning of love is like that, for a variety of reasons. Some are biochemical and some are magic, and the feelings of falling in love and discovering one another and the enormous life-changing exhilaration of being chosen and discovered are like nothing else in the world. Early in the movie Revolutionary Road April Wheeler has a flashback to the night she met Frank, their courtship, and she telling him, "You're the most interesting person I've ever met." The beginnings of love are like that, fascination and desire and belonging. Most textbooks say it's unsustainable, a illusion nature fosters to make us procreate and survive the species.

Nothing prepares you for the loss of love, or the tipping point where love turns crazy and hopeless and disappointing. The promise turning sour and the longing to loathing is the emptiest, most frustrating, rage-inducing experience in human life. We turn away from each other. We betray and wound and destroy each other. We make awful decisions and grasp at straws. April convinces herself that Paris will rejuvenate their hopes. Life intervenes and destroys them altogether. It's brilliantly staged and masterfully set, as tense and tight and grim as life itself. Marie said, "When they were fighting I knew exactly what she was feeling. It was like you and I were fighting again." I felt it too. It's instructive that Kate Winslet and the director of the movie, Sam Mendes, announced in March that their marriage was ending after five years. They'd been living separate lives, the articles said. The tension and heartache they were experiencing clearly served their movie well.

I don't have the answers as to why love fails. I know how awful it feels, and how mournful and uncertain it makes you in your deepest heart. I haven't given up. Paper Heart was a kooky and uneven movie told in an offhand and off-putting style by an unsympathetic narrator, but what appealed to me in the story were the interviews with couples who'd been married forty and fifty years. They all seemed to say that with endurance and devotion the giddy exhilarations of first love became something quite different. With time they learned to accept morning breath and bad jokes. They learned to appreciate and accept and depend on each other. The shared hardships and history had a power and a grace all their own. It made me hopeful after the shock of seeing our worst moments played out on the screen by two strangers from the 1950's.

What struck me too about Revolutionary Road was the movie magic in action. The set designers and costume designer and casting people did a fabulous job of creating the look and feel of another time in marvelous detail, even down to the distracting and awkward way men wore their high-waisted pants, the pasty white bodies lounging on wooden beach chairs, and the window on the kitchen door with slats and frosted glass. Every detail was perfect and perfectly captured, to bitterly reveal that the core of human sorrow has not changed from then to now.

Then in the last awful moment of the film we saw Mrs. Givings' husband turning down his hearing aid until he could no longer hear her, with a sneering and satisfied smile overtaking his lips. It seemed to say, in the end we negate each other with indifference. Love gives way to not caring much either way. We choke the life out of our hopes. It was the most grim, awful story I'd ever watched. I still don't think our lives have to end that way. I refuse to believe we can't make choices that will make all the difference.

The middle movie I watched in the afternoon while Marie took a nap. I wanted something light and hopeful, and Open Road, which the capsule said starred Jeff Bridges, one of my favorite actors, seemed to fit the bill. A father and son, the son a minor league ballplayer and his father a Hall of Famer, set off on a cross-country road trip and try to rediscover each other. Rediscovery is a hopeful note. They succeeded without being too heavy-handed about it. The son got the girl.

Romantic comedies are my favorite movies, but a steady diet of them rots the teeth of your imagination. It's good to take an occasional dose of something frank and strong. We have to test the muscles of our convictions. We have to see if our hopes have any sinew and fire. The goal is to become one of those people who withstand the hardships and learn how to love somebody for life.