Two For The Road

Stanley Doonan is perhaps best known for his contributions to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, in the 1940s and 50s, with classics like On The Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and, perhaps most famously, Singin’ in the Rain. However, he was also a frequent collaborator with Audrey Hepburn, some musicals but many not, on films such as Funny Face, Charade, and this one: Two For The Road. To quote a Letterboxd comment I think encapsulates their combined influence on this era: “Someone should give Stanley Donen and Audrey Hepburn credit for inventing the 60’s.”

Two For The Road is a complicated movie. It uses non-linear storytelling to explore the relationship of a man and women through the long journey of their lives. Initially this is presented in three distinct timelines, all trips through Europe, represented by different cars and different hair styles. First, the time they meet and fall in love. Second, a trip as honeymooners. Lastly, as an unhappily married couple. The movie expands from there, adding additional pieces of their story; a middle section traveling with some friends who have a kid, the husband traveling alone, and more. This creates a notable narrative complexity that is both enjoyable and a bit challenging, especially if you aren’t completely dialed in and picking up all the markers and clues as to which piece of the timeline you are in after any given time skip.

The movie is also complicated in the way it expresses its central idea of love and marriage, perhaps here a tad less successfully than with its non-linear storytelling. The beginning of the relationship, with flashes of Linkleter’s exemplary Before Sunrise, the cynical, disorganized man disinterested in relationships crosses paths by happenstance with a put together young woman with more joie de vivre. His disinterest gives way to flirtation, then to a fling, and then (unlike in Before Sunrise) a relationship. I couldn’t help but find this section of their relationship rather contrived. They are so poorly matched as personalities and their chemistry doesn’t sizzle that enjoyably on their initial adventure across Europe together. In other words, I’m not sold that there is this fiery passion that makes them ignore those incompatibilities and flaws. This issue is, I think, masked somewhat by the atypical filmic structure, but so much hinges on the film’s ideas of passion into love into complacency and drifting apart that the passion part really needs to work.

What does work, however, is the other sections. The chemistry in the trip where they are newly married is the kind of sparkle the story needs. Similarly, the trip they end up taking with the husband’s married acquaintances and their ill-mannered kid is both perfect for its comedic moments and for their relationship, with the other couple acting sometimes as a foil and sometimes as premonition, of sorts, for our central characters. The more dramatic interludes, with their squabbles and drifting apart, with mismatched priorities and familial tensions, with affairs and jealousy, all also work very well. They feel realistic. I absolutely give the filmmakers credit for reaping the crop of poorly matched personalities here that were planted so much earlier in the film. Things they should have known about each other from the start, but also things that changed about them as individuals as they grew older, create ever bigger wedges driving cracks in their relationship.

However, as the movie heads towards its final act and its exploration of the possibility of reconciliation and what love means when you’ve been with the same person for so long and through so much, there was really just one thought in my head that colored both the conclusion and the film as a whole: Albert Finney’s character is a bastard and doesn’t deserve Audrey Hepburn. I think the movie is trying to paint a portrait of two people who both have foibles and both make mistakes, but it doesn’t do enough to support that in the story. As one example of many, in one sequence they clash over her desire to return to their vacation alone and his desire to extend their stay in the villa of his new benefactor and potential client. His future ambitions and longer looking view against her now-oriented desire for intimacy and a proper honeymoon. Later, when we see these seeds grown for harvest, she still complains about his absolute focus on work and he claims that her materialism makes demands of him that requires him to be a success. A perfectly interesting, somewhat common, and reasonable balance of complaints within a relationship. Except, the movie makes little effort to show Hepburn’s materialism as a demand rather than an affectation of their financial success. In fact, if anything, the movie supports the alternative position. She repeatedly, in both words and actions, demonstrates a degree of happiness with a simpler lifestyle. She loved their old, tiny apartment. Her happiest memories are the roadtrips where they traveled with the lowest budget, and she repeatedly says that while she enjoys the trappings success has brought she doesn’t need them.

Maybe I am simply dazzled by Hepburn’s singular beauty and allowing it to shade my judgement, but I find it very difficult to buy into the underlying story of complex relationships with equally valid but contradictory viewpoints of both the world and the nature of the relationship itself when it seems so clear to me that one half is a bossy, shouty, borderline chauvinistic, poor communicator and hypocrite and the other simply feels trapped in the relationship and lashes out. It also makes the final act’s exploration of reconciliation feel more strained. As they talk around the idea that they have never really loved anyone else and that that means something, I couldn’t help thinking: “But why? He is trash and he treats you like trash.” It made rooting for the ‘happy ending,’ which I believe the movie wants you to do, a difficult proposition from my perspective.

Would Recommend: If you are looking for a more nuanced take on love and its longevity than can be found in your average rom-com.

Would Not Recommend: If you can’t stand the idea of seeing Audrey Hepburn mistreated.