Two couples are having troubles in their lives and
relationships. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) leaves his wife of 40 years because he
doesn’t want to accept that he’s old now. Their daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts),
wants to start a family and open an art gallery but neither is happening and it
puts a strain on her marriage.
It never really occurred to me before how difficult it must
be to go through a divorce when you’re a pensioner. I always thought that so
long as you had people around then you’d be alright, but obviously that’s just
not even close to being correct. Just having people around doesn’t make anyone
less lonely, the number of people you have in your life doesn’t have any
bearing on the loneliness you feel. Intimacy can reduce loneliness (it can also
increase it too, I know), and I don’t mean sexual intimacy, although that too.
Even just the little things between you and a partner can reassure you that you’re
not alone in this isolating place. And so losing the person closest to you
would be hard on anyone but I think perhaps losing them when you’re older would
be more difficult. When Alfie leaves her, Helena (Gemma Jones) tries to kill
herself and seeks comfort in a fortune teller to try and get through. She
spends a lot of her time bothering her daughter and drinking large quantities
of alcohol but seems more content now that the fortune teller has told her
positive things about her future. Alfie isn’t doing too well; he feels young at
heart and after having sex with a young prostitute he proposes to her and
lavishes a small fortune on her. She’s not interested in the things he is and
she soon cheats on him with a man her own age. He realises that the something
extra he wanted out of life was just a dream and he tries to reunite with
Helena, but she has moved on. It all seemed rather difficult and I’m not
convinced either of them were happy with the choices they made.
Sally has a crush on her new boss and she thinks he might
like her too. Her husband, Roy (Josh Brolin), is a writer who is struggling to
finish his new novel and he seems reluctant to start a family with her. She decides
that what she needs to do is open up an art gallery since that has been her
lifelong dream, and her mum has agreed to lend her the money necessary to do
so. But she discovers that her boss doesn’t actually feel anything for her and
is instead having an affair with her friend, and when she goes to her mum to
ask about getting more than the initial amount of money, she is told that she
can’t have any of the money. Sally and Roy divorce, her boss has stated he has no
interest in her, and her dream of opening a gallery seems to be getting further
away. It all gets too much and she takes it out on her mother, calling her an
idiot for listening to this fortune teller. Despite being supportive of her
mother’s apparent improvement due to the meetings with the fortune teller,
hearing that she can’t have the money seems to be the last straw and she lets
out all the vicious feelings she had been holding back. Everything she wanted
in life has been ripped away all quite quickly and so she hits out at the
easiest target.
Instead of working within the relationship to improve their
lives and help each other, they choose to look for what they want away from
their partners. I want to hope most people would try to make it work within
their relationship but I don’t think that’s actually what happens. It seems
that when people feel some sort of dissatisfaction in their lives, they hold
those closest to them responsible. It’s almost like they see them as some sort
of anchor that is weighing them down and stopping them from moving forward to
new and better things. While I’ll agree that some people can be anchors, I don’t
think that’s fair for everyone. People will always bring something to your life
and especially those closest to you, who you share things with. To blame them
for your dissatisfaction is to pick an easy target and it most likely won’t
lead to anything good.
The film was alright but I wasn’t bowled over by it. I didn’t
really believe any of the characters and so their relationships with each other
just seemed forced. The story was interesting, I do like this kind of thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment