The Hip Pocket #35: TWO FOR THE ROAD

Stanley Donen charts a turbulent romantic road with two magnetic stars

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

Two For The Road
Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron, Williams Daniels, Gabrielle Middleton, Claude Dauphin, Nadia Gray, Georges Descrieres, Jacqueline Bisset, Judy Cornwell, Irene Hilda, Dominique Joos
cinematography by Christopher Challis
music by Henry Mancini
written by Frederic Raphael
produced by Stanley Donen
directed by Stanley Donen
Not Rated
1 hr 51 mins

After sitting through Two For The Road, I’m sure even the ethereal, delicate Audrey Hepburn would agree: marriage is a motherfucker.

This process of writing reviews on commission was interesting. My writing about film developed in a very strange organic way, starting with me only writing about what interested me, when it interested me, and nothing else. If anything, it was a hobby. It was a way of taking my mind off my creative work while still keeping it engaged in film theory. When I decided to buckle down and make writing about film my job, it was because I had young children and I wanted stability. Turning it into something that was done on the timetable of the studios and their marketing plans slowly but surely leached the joy out of what I was doing, and it started to affect the way I even thought about film. It was dangerous, and when I finally left HitFix, I was burned out, not sure I wanted to write about film or, frankly, much of anything.

There is something fundamentally weird about the entire endeavor of writing art criticism in the first place. It is an act of description. It is an attempt to capture the feeling of one experience and convey it in a totally different way. It is a fool’s errand, one I repeat every single time I sit down to talk about a movie… and I love it. I love it more now than I did when I began. I love it because I have come to view it as a thing that is not a book report, not a consumer guide to how you should spend your eight dollars, and not a punctuation mark on the end of someone’s release strategy for a movie. Film criticism stands separate from all of that at its best, and I feel lucky to have been reminded of that.

Sometimes, accepting that art is an imperfect way of conveying something is part of the process, and struggling to find a new way of conveying it can be thrilling for a filmmaker. When you’re someone like Stanley Donen, who started his career with On The Town, and who made one of the greatest movies of all time, Singin’ In The Rain, his fourth time at bat, it must have been fascinating to see how films evolved between the early ‘50s and the late ‘60s, and instead of watching it all roll by, he was right there in it, stretching and doing his best to add to the expanding vocabulary of film instead of just digging in and doing things the way he’d always done them. To be fair, there are moments even in something as broadly mainstream as Singin’ In The Rain that feel almost experimental, and it feels to me like Donen was always interested in finding a way to create a strong emotional reaction in his audience. He wanted you to feel, first and foremost, and that seems far more important to him than story or structure.