“Another Year,” the latest from Mike Leigh, was perhaps the most uncomfortable film I’ve ever watched. It is painful. Like Pride and Prejudice, the film’s story revolves around marriage. The central married couple, a therapist and a geological engineer, seems to have arrived at that magical plateau where they move through the seasons – a year’s worth, in fact – almost as one. The way they revolve around each other may not elicit bottle rockets but it does go beyond comfortable and arrives at the ultimate destination – comforting. They have careers, a home, a vegetable garden, a grown son, relations and friends.
And that’s the strangest part of the film: their friends, Mary in particular. Mary’s ineligibility for marriage seems to have been irrevocably confirmed and it becomes more so with each passing scene. The more stark her status as ineligible becomes, in fact, the more out of control her behavior, which reaches a crescendo of sorts when the married couple’s son decides to surprise her by introducing her to his new girlfriend. Mary does not react well – she feels thwarted by him, for starters – and for that her open invitation to the household is more or less revoked. As the wife explains to Mary eventually, “This is my family. You have to understand that.”
I understand that all too well, personally, but I couldn’t help but wonder, as I watched the horror unfold on my television screen, why married couples pal around with their hopelessly single friends and then banish them the moment one of them goes off script. Is it some form of charity? Is it an attempt to democratize the alleged good fortune they’ve found? Does setting a place at the table for one who has failed to settle down suitably somehow sweeten the success for those who have achieved bullet proof couplehood? Or is the opportunity to always have a built-in butt of the jokes too good to pass up? The married couple, their son and his girlfriend all dread Mary’s arrival and scorn her immediately following her departure, which I suppose is their right, but my question – for the family in the film, and for certain relations of my own who are unfortunately not confined to film – is this: Why invite people whose company you clearly do not care for into your circle?
In the meantime, circles are being formed and broken and then reformed at the speed of sound throughout the Bennett household and its surrounding towns, villages and cities. Mrs. Bennett has a bitingly sarcastic husband, a home she’s in grave danger of losing, a weakness for making declarations before they’re ready to be made, a fierce competition with one of the neighbors and, not least among her concerns, five daughters. For Mrs. Bennett, getting those girls married off is hardly a romantic fancy: It’s all business, baby. As I’ve said, I’ve never read anything by Jane Austen so I have no idea where this is going but I am enjoying, as they say, the journey.
As I was sitting on my couch on Thursday night pondering the overblown significance of marriage in both film and print, a show on NPR called Tell Me More came on, and guess what? It being June and all – wedding time! – it seems a gay guy has written an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times in which he announced that he’s declining invitations to friends’ weddings this year because he’s tired of supporting an institution from which he is legally excluded. The institution of marriage exists, he explained, because people participate in it by getting married. And the institution of marriage thrives, he continued, because people participate in it by … getting married.
Why this line of thinking took until June 2011 to bubble up to the surface is beyond me, but I’m glad it finally did.
The strangest part of the interview, I thought, was the gay guy’s apologetic tone. “I don’t want to punch my straight friends in the face,” he said. Good for him, I suppose, but punching is exactly what I feel like doing. As is the case with commenting truthfully about ushering forth children as if the act itself were a favor to us all and then buying SUVs to cart them around town in, I think we – me included – tiptoe around the marriage issue, making one weird little exception after another in order to not offend or more seriously wound the people we like. But I’ve come to believe that in the current climate, getting married, not to mention creating a spectacle over it, is a deal breaker. I don’t think expressing your “support” for the gay marriage crusade makes much difference either. I “support” the crusade against grand theft on Wall Street, yet I keep my checking account at the Bank of America because there are ATMs aplenty. That alone, in a single stroke, renders my “support” null and void.
I know we’re not supposed to mix and match and borrow and compare when it comes to struggles, oppression and discrimination, but here’s a scenario that keeps meandering through my mind. If I patronized a restaurant known to refuse to serve or employ people of a certain ethnicity, nationality or color, and especially if I refused to shut up about how good the food is – even if I hastily added “And I can’t wait for the day when you can eat there too!” – I’d expect my friends to accuse me of supporting racism. And to disagree with them would be not only foolish but impossible.
