Two for the Road (1967) Directed by Stanley Donen
Two for the Road has fascinated and perplexed me for decades. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, and it was indeed interesting re-experiencing my feelings about if from so long ago when I was essentially a different person, 22 as opposed to (gulp) 80 just. I have always realised that it was far from a perfect movie. The late middle section drags, and screenwriter Frederic Raphael (
Darling; Far from the Madding Crowd; Eyes Wide Shut) seems to not care greatly for his minor characters whom he presents as annoying caricatures with no depth whatsoever. Clearly, he is interested in the relationship between Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn), and that’s what grabbed me, too. To suggest that
Two for the Road belongs in the romantic comedy category is to place a rather broody fox among the chickens in the hen house. Touring around Europe together during various periods of the characters' lives provides some strong romantic elements, and funny, even witty, moments are not in short supply, but the movie has a venom that seemed utterly foreign to Hollywood movies about romantic relationships. A lot of the time Mark and Joanna spend talking about how unhappy they are with one another, with Mark being the more constant offender on that score. Theirs is not exactly a love/hate relationship, but it is a relationship that seems continuously in a state of crisis where the scale between contentment and misery has a very delicate balance.
Likely this rather atypical relationship had more impact on me than expected because of the performers. Hepburn plays her character as a slightly older variation of Reggie in
Charade: charming, lovely, intoxicating, vulnerable, deeply sympathetic. By the standards of the mid-sixties, she is about ten years too old for the role, but her appeal is such that I never thought of that the first time I saw the movie. Finney, though, my god, he sinks his incisors hard into all of Mark’s rather jarring character flaws. You get the feeling deep down that she loves him, but it is not so certain the other way around. He is like the character in the Eagles’ song who can’t tell you why he stays, but he stays anyway. Finney walks the finest of lines, just charming enough to keep us from seeing him as a brute, just vulnerable enough to semi-overlook his crustiness. But he is the reason the movie has an acerbic tone that is so memorable. I kept comparing some of the wittier dialogue to
Charade’s script. There are lines read by Finney that sound like real put-downs of his partner. I couldn’t help but think that Cary Grant would have read many of these same lines with a completely different inflection that would have turned them into inward self-deprecations rather than outward insults. However, Finney plays the edge for all it is worth, and in doing so, literally drags the film into another dimension.
Another thing that makes the movie seem very non-Hollywood (besides all the talk of bad sex) is that Stanley Donen (
Singing in the Rain; Indiscreet; Charade) steals the style of his movie so directly from French New Wave director Alain Resnais that he could literally be charged with plagiarism. Like in Resnais’ seminal works, time is a very malleable thing—you can go forward in it or backward in it at any moment—and the fragmentary nature of time does a lot to contribute to the bittersweet mood of
Two for the Road. The non-linearity mimics the characters’ memories in a lot of ways with one association bringing on another, creating a mishmash of moods and feelings that get smooshed together as though they exist in some dimension beyond time.
In the end,
Two for the Road still left me with a sense of melancholy. This is to Donen’s credit, I think. He uses a beautifully reflective and pensive theme written by Henry Mancini that fits the mood of the film perfectly. I actually could have used a little less of it, to be honest. But whenever I hear the tune (Pat Metheny has an especially lovely version), it immediately puts me back within the feelings that the film visits upon me. Our lives are so incredibly random. The movie doesn’t make a big point of this, but it doesn’t ignore it either. Mark could have easily gone off with Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset) and had a whole other life. As could we all. The penultimate scene of the movie is a quarrel in a Mercedes in which Mark keeps jerking the car to a stop to say something every time Joanna says something. That herky-jerky rhythm, start and stop, start and stop, mirrors their relationship is so many ways that it seems a fitting ending. It’s like neither will ever quite get comfortable with their relationship again, that the status quo still has meaning but it is not strong enough to hold forever. A Paul Simon line provides the perfect epitaph for the film. “Love emerges, and it disappears. I do it for your love.”
Sidenote: If there is a happy version of this movie, it probably is
Before Sunrise. Though, of course, the rest of the trilogy leans ever closer to
Two for the Road territory.
