rjfaust
Over the years I've held an image of Audrey Hepburn as a truly superior artist and actress. I was offended at the juvenile behavior by the characters portrayed by Ms. Hepburn and Albert Finney. They both appear to suffer from ADD and be in need of ritalin.Or. if I may say so, their characters show what happens to people who enter adulthood without a moral compass and seem to be spiritually bankrupt. Ms Hepburn seems to have gravitated between two polls in her choices of roles: Either they're too serious ("The Nun's Story") or an increasingly annoying flit: ("Breakfast at Tiffany's; "Two for the Road"). Whatever the "story" is that this movie tells, it could be told just as effectively in half the time. As it is, the film drags on f o r e v e r. When it was over, I felt disappointed and disgusted--and angry for the absolute waste of two hours watching this paean to immaturity and stupidity. In an age of dumbing down of everything, Ms. Hepburn paves the way for the Paris Hiltons and Kardashians of this age. Yuck!
elevenangrymen
Two For The Road came out of nowhere and completely blindsided me. It was a Friday night, I had nothing to do, and this was Hepburn and Donan, who had worked so well together in Charade. I had absolutely no warning of the film I was about to watch, I thought I was watching a charming romantic comedy, and that was somewhat true. I was watching a charming romantic comedy mixed with gut wrenching drama.The story is the marriage of two people Joanna and Mark. They meet when Joanna's choir group gets sick with the chicken pox, leaving only Mark and Joanna unharmed. They both head out on the road to hitchhike falling in love in the process. The film follows their marriage from the beginning all the way to the end, or perhaps just a new beginning.The first thing that I find unique about Two For The Road is it's non-linear narrative. We cut back and forth from the beginning, to the end, to the middle, etc. It keeps the film fresh and exciting and makes the scenes of early love so gut-wrenching as opposed to the later scenes of fighting and pain. This film is not afraid to show two people fall in love at the same time as the fall out of love. Now the performers. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney have the greatest chemistry than I have ever seen. As opposed to her previous films with her falling in love with men 30 years her senior, here the relationship feels perfectly balanced. This is probably Audrey Hepburn's best performance, and one of Albert Finney's greatest.The film balances however on maintaining a balance between the earlier and later scenes and this duty falls mainly upon the director and the writer. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael is wonderful featuring many scenes of wonderful comedy and heartbreaking drama. The direction by Stanley Donan is some of his best.The film however suffers from the classic "hollywood ending" which is taints an otherwise great film, making it instead just very good. I give it 10 stars because it managed to move me in a way I have never felt before. It is a truly great film.
James Hitchcock
Like a number of Audrey Hepburn's films ("Funny Face", "Charade", "Paris When It Sizzles" and others), "Two for the Road" is set in France, but whereas those films were all set in Paris this one takes place in the French countryside. It opens with a British couple, Mark and Joanna Wallace, flying their white Mercedes-Benz roadster to Northern France. Their plan is to drive down through the country to Saint-Tropez where Mark, an architect, has a meeting with a wealthy client, the idea being to combine business with pleasure. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that there are tensions in their marriage, and the two are constantly bickering and quarrelling. As they journey through France they discuss and recall several earlier trips along the same route, especially those in the earlier days of their marriage when their relationship was a happier one.Trying to explain the plot any further would be difficult because the story is told in an extreme non-linear fashion, abruptly switching without warning between scenes set in the present and those set in the past and mingling the events of one journey with those of another. The only way in which director Stanley Donen and scriptwriter Frederic Raphael attempt to maintain continuity is, at each stage of the journey, to juxtapose scenes of the present day with scenes set in the same geographical area during previous journeys.I have been a great fan of Audrey Hepburn ever since I fell in love with her watching "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as a teenager, but even I have to admit that "Two for the Road" is both one of her weaker films and one of her weaker performances. It would seem that there are roles beyond the reach of even an actress of her talents, and the role of a wife whose husband is tired of her appears to have been one of them. Now I am well aware that in real life Audrey was twice divorced, but her screen persona, at least in her comedies- and this film is officially a comedy- was almost invariably that of a beautiful, playful, enchanting and utterly adorable girl, the sort of woman that no husband could possibly tire of unless he were either mad or a complete bastard. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, when a man is tired of Audrey Hepburn, he is tired of life. Had Audrey been able to hint at a darker side to Joanna's personality, Mark's disillusionment with married life might have been more understandable, but Joanna comes across as just as totally lovable as every other Hepburn heroine from Sabrina to Suzy in "Wait Until Dark"- and, even though Audrey was 38 when she made the film, just as beautiful.Albert Finney, by contrast, has no difficulty in playing a man whose wife is tired of him; the problem here is that his Mark is so charmless and arrogant that it is difficult to understand why Joanna should have fallen for him in the first place, or why their marriage should have lasted so long. Finney, incidentally, was seven years younger than Hepburn, which must have made a refreshing change for an actress who spent much of the earlier part of her career playing the love-interest to men old enough to be her father (Bogart, Fonda, Astaire, Harrison) or nearly so (Peck).As I said, the film is officially a comedy, and there are indeed some genuinely comic moments, ranging from the slapstick to the satirical. An example of the former is the scene where Mark and Joanna's car runs out of control down a hill and ends up demolishing a barn- that could have been something out of Buster Keaton. Most of the satire is at the expense of Mark's American ex-girlfriend Cathy Maxwell-Manchester, her pompous, priggish husband Howard and their badly-behaved daughter Ruthie. Even though the film had an American director, these scenes are based upon what were some fairly common British prejudices about Americans around this period, and doubtless explain why the film was not a great success across the Atlantic.Unfortunately, the film's comic elements do not sit very easily with its underlying serious theme, the decline in the relationship between Mark and Joanna. This theme is also undermined by the film's unorthodox structure and non-linear narrative which makes it difficult to follow the progress of that relationship or to understand what is going on. The movie was in its day considered "experimental", but not every experiment, whether in science or the cinema, is a successful one, and I was left with the strong impression that the story of Mark and Joanna is one that could have benefited from a more conventional, linear style. 5/10
