When A Man Loves A Woman (1994)

2 years ago

When A Man Loves A Woman (1994)

WHEN A MAN LOVES MEG RYAN

by Tess Lynch

Marketing your own personal experiences as art is difficult. When a writer decides to tackle a project the content of which borders on autobiographical, the results can be dazzling, or they can fall flat. The more personal the topic, the more difficult it is to package it without getting in the way of yourself. This is the problem with When A Man Loves A Woman.

Co-written by Al Franken, — I mean Senator Al Franken — the story draws on his personal experiences with his wife’s alcohol dependency (something which Senator Franken and his wife have addressed publicly, most recently in a campaign ad) and his experiences in Al-Anon. If you believe it, rehabilitation culture is also where Franken got his inspiration for Stuart Smalley and his “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough” affirmations. It’s a worthwhile subject to explore, and in many ways WAMLAW does a noble job of exposing the workings of a relationship that’s hit a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. And I do like that: I like how this film navigates problems like dependency, and isolation within a marriage, and when spouses enter into destructive patterns but still love each other too much to give up on their relationship. It’s not romantic, when two people acknowledge their problems and show each other the terribly ugly sides of themselves; it’s not pretty when people change into Themselves V. 2.0 Beta and they’re all buggy and don’t work like they used to. There may come a point when you look at your partner and see something worse than if you had seen a stranger: worst of all, you can’t remember if they’ve changed or if you have.

lover's spat?

Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review of When a Man Loves a Woman, references the 1974 low-budget film A Woman Under The Influence in the title, perhaps because the earlier film succeeds where WAMLAW fails. John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under The Influence for his wife, Gena Rowlands: she wanted a vehicle, he obliged, and they shot it relying heavily upon students at AFI and Peter Falk’s investment scrillz. Nobody would distribute it until Richard Dreyfuss claimed it moved him to vomit (I’m taking only a very slight liberty, putting it like that), and then Rowlands and Cassavetes were nominated for Oscars because it was so goddamn amazing. This is an example of the kind of movie When A Man Loves A Woman dreamt of being, before it went in another (more marketable, arguably) direction. Though Gena Rowlands was playing a woman struggling with mental illness, not an alcoholic, these two films are both about families that fracture when their matriarch needs to take a solid time-out.

hottie rowlands
Gena Rowlands is such a fox it hurts my eyeballs to look at her.

Rowlands had requested a role that showed the “difficulties faced by contemporary women” (says Wiki), and, in its way, When a Man Loves a Woman paints a similar picture: Michael (played by Andy Garcia, after Tom Hanks dropped out) loves Alice when she’s drunk (she’s fun! She vandalizes automobiles without justification, and she and Michael share a laugh), though he, of course, comes to recognize her drinking as a problem in the early part of the film. When Alice crashes through a shower door and mistreats their daughter Jess (played by Tina Majorino, giving Drew Barrymore a run for her money in the “adorable precocious wee child” category), Michael is forced to acknowledge what’s become of his wife — but the person she is while sober is unfamiliar to him. Her sobriety alienates her from Michael, too, and she seeks comfort in a fellow recovery member, Gary (a really creepy Philip Seymour Hoffman); it’s not a gender-specific double-standard, of course, but there is certainly a comment here on the rift between people whose lives become destroyed by dependency and their un-afflicted loved ones, as well as the pressure to handle the stresses of parenthood and marriage with a carefree giggle and a non-destructive martini.

sunglasses at night
I don’t trust people who wear sunglasses.

The thing about Meg Ryan is that she has always been able to pull off “imperfect” in a completely attractive way. She is so vulnerable onscreen that it’s impossible not to relate to her; I chalk this up to one part babyface, two parts willingness to cry realistically or otherwise engage in pratfalls without concern for her mascara or snot. She stays in character in all of her performances and completely loses her Meg Ryan-ness (see: the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, the crashing-through-the-shower scene in When A Man Loves A Woman, and YOU KNOW WHICH SCENE from In The Cut); I think that this ability is dependent on being able to convince yourself that what you’re acting in any particular scene is transient (like life: a moment exists and then disappears) rather than being committed to Forever by way of film. This ability is so perfectly suited to a movie that’s about personal ugliness that it renders When A Man Loves A Woman so much more than it would have been with another actress in its lead role. I find it so interesting that a person whose very humanity was her talent would do this to her face, by the way:

KNIFESTYLEZ
“Yeah, and ‘baby fishmouth’ is sweeping the nation”

There was a great segment on the first season of In Treatment where this couple (Embeth Davitz as woman named Amy and Josh Charles as her husband Jake) were going to counseling, and Jake recorded Amy talking some shit by surreptitiously using the voice notes feature on his cell phone. After she’d finished her tirade, he called her out on something she’d said, which she denied; she’d just started defending herself when Jake whipped out the cell phone and played back what she’d said. It was such an effective moment: first of all, instead of accomplishing what he was after (making Amy look like an asshole), Jake came off as a real snake; second of all, there’s a pitch our fights reach when we’ve been in relationships for a while that is so atrocious that we almost have to rewrite our love stories, editing out the nastiest bits. Otherwise, we’d have to keep finding new people for whom to reinvent ourselves. This movie could have been the story of the worst things people can do to each other, and how to use those things to create a better, stronger, more enduring love — that if you can trust someone to stay with you after you’ve shown them the darkest part of your soul, “love” must be something more than the first tingle you get when he texts you three months into your relationship to say he thinks maybe he loves you. It must take on a life of its own that can redeem us.

loveeyes

Unfortunately, this movie, like Meg Ryan’s lips, would have benefited from an easier hand. Its imperfections and ugliness were its strength; its message would have been clearer if it hadn’t been articulated via such lines as “[my wife] has 600 different smiles. They can light up your life. They can make you laugh out loud, just like that. They can even make you cry, just like that. That’s just with her smiles.” As a moviegoer, it’s nice to see an actress with Meg Ryan’s charm be a real, troubled, nasty person; it’s refreshing, especially, to see a woman do this — it’s so rare. As a human being, it’s nice to see a relationship endure real, and really horrific, scenarios; when a movie stops short of delivering on this reality, and you see the marketing gears turning somewhere within it, it’s disappointing because it’s a rejection of the real world’s inherent characteristics. It’s naïve. And, for better or worse, I think most people understand the darker parts of humanity better than Hollywood thinks we do.

Tess Lynch abuses food in this video for Funny or Die, and abuses your trust by using Filmosophy to plug said video. She Tumbls here.