Then I didn't watch it again for nearly 15 years.
It was August 22, 2010, just three days before the birth of my first son -- though we didn't know he was going to be a son at the time, and we didn't know he would be the first of an eventual two. I can't remember why I chose to watch it that Sunday afternoon, but the emotional pregnancy of our actual pregnancy made me perfectly primed to receive all its wisdom about marriage and parenting. In fact, so primed that when I came to the end of it, and my wife walked into the room, I told her how much it had affected me, and we started watching it again.
It was not my first time seeing the movie. I'd watched it once and reviewed it (positively) when it first came out. Actually, it was one of the retroactive reviews I did for AllMovie, since I wasn't yet reviewing for them on its actual release date. But there were a lot of gaps to fill in their database when I started writing for them in 2000, a year after The Story of Us came out, and I did a lot of gap filling.
It hadn't impacted me as much the first time, perhaps because I was yet another ten years earlier in my life and I wasn't even dating anyone seriously, let alone contemplating marriage or children as an immediate prospect. It walloped me, though, in 2010.
If I didn't watch it again in the 15 years since, it isn't because I doubted my impression of the movie formed on that day. Maybe it was for the same reason I chose these movies for watching when my wife was out of town, as she was last night when I watched The Story of Us for the first time since. If you don't want your wife to think you're unhappy in your marriage, you best not randomly rewatch a movie about marital troubles when she's walking through the living room and forming her own thoughts about why you may have chosen this time to watch this movie.
But watching this movie on Valentine's Day eve was appropriate because this is, first and foremost, a love story, and a terrifically moving one at that. And you can imagine how now having been married for 17 years, and a father for nearly 15 of those, gives me so much fuller an appreciate of this love story, as well as the pain and difficulty that threatens to unravel it.
And if possible, I loved this movie even more this time, and am now contemplating intentionally dueling it on Flickchart -- as in, selecting the title for a purposeful re-ranking -- so it lands in my top 100 movies of all time.
That's a funny thing to admit about a movie that basically no one thinks was very good. I'm not sure why The Story of Us was coldly received and remains a sort of forgotten movie in Rob Reiner's filmography, which is as impressive as anyone's for a ten-year-stretch from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. And I might actually like The Story of Us more than all but a few of those films.
Since you are undoubtedly in the "I don't agree with what you're saying or I didn't see the movie" crowd, I'm not sure this post is for you, or if you'll appreciate most of the things I'm about to say about this movie, some of which I said in a post that went up on the actual day my son was born (which you you can find here). Maybe it's only for me, but then again, most blogging has to only be for yourself because no one else is going to care about this stuff as much as you do.
I again noticed the details of this movie as I was watching it last night, and just started to jot down notes on my phone. Instead of organizing my thoughts into a coherent piece, I think I will just list a bunch of things I love about this movie. But first, let me just give you the basic story. And instead of rewriting, I think I'll just copy what I wrote back in 2010:
The movie was referred to sarcastically at the time as When Harry Broke Up With Sally. It stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple married for 15 years, who are taking advantage of having their son and daughter away at camp for the summer, to try out a separation that may ultimately lead to divorce. The movie begins a few days before the kids leave for camp, and ends when they return. In between, Ben and Katie Jordan do their best to live their lives apart, with the inevitable moments together -- some of which are positive, some of which remind them why they're no longer suited to be together. The movie progresses along during their present tense of that summer, but it also flashes back to the memories they're cataloguing of 15 years of marriage. These memories are triggered by conversations they have with their friends (a well-cast group of Reiner, Rita Wilson, Paul Reiser and Julie Hagerty), as well as mundane things that happen in everyday life.
I went on to write a lot of other things that I could probably repeat in some form here, but I've already linked to the post, so you can read it if you want. But just let me get to the notes I jotted down, reasons I love The Story of Us and reasons you should see it if you haven't -- even on Valentine's Day.
- In a story that contains a number of very short flashbacks to when these two were much younger and not yet married, there's one scene that plays out in full that I love for how it establishes these characters. Katie is an intern typing away on an old typewriter in the office where Ben works as a TV writer, and he's trying to get her attention by throwing small office supplies at her -- nothing that will hurt her, of course, like paper clips and the like. She pretends she does not notice. Finally you would think she can't help but acknowledge what's going on when he tosses a shower of maybe a dozen paper clips. She does respond to this, but she does it by going to the other room and coming back wearing a pith helmet with a rotating police siren on top of it. She returns to her typing as if nothing had happened ... only a few moments later finally making eye contact with Ben and smiling broadly. What a playful way to establish the basic parameters of their dynamic ... as well as establishing some of the ways she has changed and he has not, potentially both to their detriment.
- I said in my previous post that I love the details of this movie, the details it does not need to spend the time to get right but does anyway. One I noticed last night is when Ben and Katie, not having told their kids their situation, visit them at camp on parents' weekend and are staying in their usual cabin, with Ben planning to sleep on the couch. Ben is wearing a Camp Pinewood t-shirt, which you would think he might have just bought that day as a showing of additional financial support for the camp. However, if you look closer, you can see that there is a hole in the collar, indicating that not only was this bought some other year, maybe even three or four years ago, but that Ben is the type of guy who wears the camp t-shirt to the camp he's visiting. These details seem accidental but someone actually had to think about them, which is one of the things that gives The Story of Us its feeling of bracing authenticity.
- And speaking of this cabin, Willis has a great line delivery when his daughter asks if they are staying in the "acorn cabin," because an emotional Ben has just started crying when he saw them and is now trying desperately to cover that up. The rest of his family is walking toward the dining hall and he shouts after them "Yes! We got the acorn cabin!" It's hilarious, even though I am not conveying it very well.
- I love Paul Reiser's rant about why Ben can't write a book about his grandmother. Reiser plays Ben's agent, and the first thing he asks Ben is if his grandmother fucked a president. When Ben doesn't seem to understand that his grandmother is too insignificant of a figure for a book that has any hope of selling copies, Reiser takes him to the window of his office building to look out at the people below, and goes into a long diatribe about how all the people below will some day die. He discusses all the things they spend their time doing, working his way up over the course of a minute of ranting to the idea that none of them wants to read a book about his fucking grandmother. It's great writing and really funny.
- In one of the longer flashbacks to just, I believe it was, the previous year, Ben and Katie take a trip to Italy to try to jumpstart their marriage. Which works, until they return home ... and all the familiar problems immediately resurface. But in Italy, they meet an annoying other couple of Americans, and Ben instinctively recognizes that he wants to give them a false name because he doesn't want anything to do with them -- even though the others will probably immediately see that it is a false name. He says "We're the Mansons," and without a pause she chimes in with "From Spahn Ranch." Now, you could say this is just screenwriters being too clever. I prefer to think of it as them being on the same wavelength to such an extent that they immediately grok what the other is doing and have a witty retort at the ready -- which makes sense because they are both great linguists, he a writer and she a designer of crossword puzzles. This is borne out in the next scene when they are playing a game of hangman in plain sight under the table while sitting with this annoying couple.
- The boy their daughter has a crush on at camp is named twice, and the second time I was sure I caught it correctly: Austin Butler. I just think that's funny because we now have an Austin Butler of our own.
- Reiner is great with scenes shot in public locations, specifically restaurants. We all know about his famous scene in When Harry Met Sally ("I'll have what she's having"), but there's a good one here too -- not because I think the rant Ben gives here is the strongest part of the movie by any stretch. In fact, it might be the only part of the movie that made me cringe a bit. What I really love is the reactions of the other diners to his rant, which is that they start looking over and theorizing among themselves about what's going on. A good director is aware of what's going on in the scene, even with the extras, and there's no doubt that Reiner is a good director.
- There's one concept in this movie that I have the occasion to think about regularly in my life. If I said I thought about it once a month, that might not be an exaggeration. It's the idea, put forth by the character played by Reiner, that the ass is an illusion. Really, there is no ass; what we call the ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. Not only is this an interesting metaphor for the illusions that are part of every marriage -- the ones we bring in, and the ones that change over time -- but it's also just a damn funny idea. What's more, it has a great callback in Ben's otherwise a bit over-the-top restaurant rant.
- Eric Clapton wrote the song "Get Lost" for this movie, and little bits of it play throughout in a wonderful way of setting the tone and tying it all together. It's not that I know this song particularly well from my daily life, but it's used so effectively and feels so -- preexisting? -- that I had trouble believing it was actually written for the film.
- And oh yeah, it packs all this into only 95 minutes.
That's all I wrote down, but I could go on. I won't, of course. Like the people in Paul Reiser's rant, you too will someday die and maybe today you don't want to read much more about The Story of Us.
I will, however, leave you with three concluding thoughts, as I wait for my wife to return for Valentine's Day tonight, with a slightly fuller understanding of how I could be a better husband and partner from having watched this movie.
1) I was reduced to tears at the end of this movie. Again. The final speech by Michelle Pfeiffer is just so great that I might have to write a separate post about it at some point. It's actually one of two moments in the last ten minutes that get to me this way, both of which got me again. In fact, just in preparing for these moments, I felt myself starting to get choked up at other, smaller moments.
2) Part of the fuller sense of emotion I felt while watching this movie likely had to do with the reminder of what Bruce Willis was once capable of. I'm sorry that he will never be able to give this sort of performance again.
3) The title of this post is obviously a play on the title of the movie and as a real encapsulation of what this movie ultimately is, which is why again, I encourage you to watch it as a sort of counterintuitive Valentine's Day movie. But it has another meaning as well. If you add in the words "I" and "The" and "of Us" to my title, you'd get "I love The Story of Us," which is also true. And I won't hide this love just because others have not yet discovered it.
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