two for the road

Stanley Donen's Two for the Road (1967) is the story of a fractured marriage told in an invigoratingly fractured fashion. The director, a big part of the old Hollywood studio system, winds up incorporating the innovative editing style of French New Wave directors like Godard and Truffaut to cut between the highs and lows of a relationship that seemed almost doomed from the start.

Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) begin the movie at each other's throat, yet, ironically, enjoying the financial fruits of their success. A respected architect, Mark's life is pulled in too many directions to give his wife the sort of attention and affection she deserves. Joanna longs for the adrenaline rush of their early romance, spent over the course of a weeks vacation in France.

Jumping from one clever transition to the next, Two for the Road shows us Mark and Joanna's life from every perspective at once, cutting between road trips and hotel rooms separated by ten years of more. The effect is showy but supremely effective, and offers up a realistic contrast between the naive newlyweds and the bickering, backstabbing couple they've become.

But Donen's film, for all its technical and social innovations, still suffers from a fatal case of the "cutes." Finney and Joanna have wonderful chemistry (supposedly both onscreen and off), and the film revels in their mismatched personalities to the point of overindulgence. Even with the threat of divorce looming, it seems there's no problem that can't be solved with a good pratfall into the pool. It's a tone that's curiously out of touch with the film's grand design...and with the institution of marriage in general. And Henry Mancini's breezy score, punctuated with overblown comic flourishes, only emphasizes the problem.

That doesn't mean Two for the Road is a lost cause. Just like a marriage, for better or worse means overlooking some of the film's flaws to enjoy the costumes (Hepburn, always a fashion icon, never looked better), the scenery and two actors who seem to be having a grand old time...even when they're forced to pretend that they're not.

Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition offers up another fine HD transfer from 20th Century Fox. Extras include a Donen commentary and another from TT regulars Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo (whose liner notes point out, quite rightly, the film's rather anti-feminist slant). An isolated score track, Fox Movietone newsreel and theatrical trailer complete the package.