Is This Thing On?
A realistic and grounded look at living life together, when one of you is an elite athlete, some of your friends are enduring each other and contemplating ‘til death do us part, your Mum/Mother-in-Law is helpfully (and with best intentions) interfering in your marriage, and your other half is using the catharsis of live stand up comedy as marriage therapy.
Though it starts off crudely, the movie gets better and better as it goes on — mostly due to the cinematography of Matthew Libatique which creates very intimate, almost eavesdropping moments, and entirely due to the phenomenal central performances of Will Arnett and Laura Dern as unhappily married Alex and Tess Novak.
Rather than The Roses’ style unhappily married, this is more tense and confused and a couple who genuinely still like each other, care for each other and their children — and support each other. Yet are deeply hurting, frustrated with each other and growing apart. Can they be reconciled? Should they?
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They start living apart and sharing family time. Blundering in to a comedy club and on to the stage, Alex discovers his natural comic timing and gift for reading an audience. He also discovers jealously as he thinks his wife has a new man in her life and the importance of privacy as his children discover his journal of joke ideas, involving a lot of details of their family life. Cue a cute barrage of baffled questions. Not to mention a ‘ground swallow me now’ moment when your sort of ex-wife turns up at your comedy gig with someone who could be her new partner and overhears you using your new life and her as jokes.
Bradley Cooper is unrecognisable as their actor hipster BFF ‘Balls’, sporting dapper facial hair for either a) a bit part in a The Chosen type play or b) a Western in Texas. Andra Day seethes as an angry Rihanna-look-a-like housewife, who can only deal with life with her stagey and man-child husband through doctored cookies. Both husband and wife start viewing their married animosity differently as their friends separate, and considering their options.
A lot of the stand up is really funny, as is Alex developing a new life and family in the comedy clubs. Even an apparent relationship — which the camera shows us has the capability to escalate to high blown melodrama as his potential new partner is being coached by his wife in a sports team. But this is not that kind of movie. Rather than shouty confrontations in sports halls or outside in a car park, this is about quiet tears and hyperventilating in the shower, and lingering in the car outside the former family home, yearning for everything to be different.
Uniquely, this is about a husband and wife learning to talk, flirt and fancy each other again. It’s tender as they discuss their hurts (particularly during IVF and major life changes), misunderstand each other and celebrate each other. There are also some lovely child performances from the young actors playing their children — and love is listening to Under Pressure performed in the local school by your kids band, showing up for them and enjoying the enthusiastic conducting of a teacher. Love is being family together — happy or sad. Up there with ‘I’m Just A Girl Standing In Front of a Boy’ is ‘I was miserable in the marriage, not miserable being married to you…and I want to be unhappy with you’. Whilst it doesn’t explore the frustrations of the friends’ marriage in depth, we do get some insights into their thinking and relational pivots, lightly contrasted with some happy newly married friends, who support the others and bicker politely over the use and washing up of cutlery for midnight snacks.
Can you have love and long term marriage? YES! say Bradley Cooper and John Bishop — and you can turn it into comedy gold and hope. Bradley Cooper does it again, directing and contributing to the screenplay, with lots of input from Will Arnett, Mark Chappell and John Bishop. Watch out too for Ciaran Hinds as Alex’s Dad! and for unexpected product placement of Bananagrams and Guess Who?!
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