Mary Milan and I saw Michael Clayton over the weekend. Though it seems all important and socially conscious, it’s basically an adaptation of a John Grisham novel. It’s got all the elements: a haggard lawyer who finds his conscience, starched white shirts and running. That’s not to say it’s not good because it’s quite good. It’s smart, tense and terribly well made; a great little magic trick.
Before the movie started, we saw trailers for Things We Lost in the Fire and P.S. I Love You, two new “dead husband” movies, a genre that seems to have come back to prominence since Catch and Release.
These are insidious, insidious films. They all go pretty much all go like this: boy meets girl; they fall in love and get married; boy dies tragically; girl becomes morose; girl meets boy’s best friend; against her wishes, girl gets her groove back and finds that through the tragic death of her husband, she has learned something about love and life…with his best friend.
Are we the only ones that find this kind of creepy and gross? What these movies are really saying is that if you’re a girl and you want to find true, true love, you just have hope that your husband dies so that you can fall into the loving arms of his best friend.
Even The Brave One and Rendition feature dead or missing husbands.
And it’s not just the husbands who are getting the shaft. I know of two upcoming dead wife movies, Grace is Gone and Martian Child, and in an odd coincidence, they both star John Cusack who must, after the tragic death of his wife/fiancee, become a father and raise his kids.
So let met get this straight, in the movies, if a husband dies, it’s the widow’s challenge to learn to love another man so that she can be happy and if a wife dies, the widower’s challenge to figure out how to raise kids.
What the hell is up with that? Why can’t guys get their groove back? Fall in love with his dead wife’s best friend?
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COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS
joey jerusalem added these pithy words on Oct 08 07 at 1:03 pmUm, hate to be Captain Obvious, but don’t these movies simply offer an escapist fantasy of the opposite of what happens in real life (ie real widows are generally considered damaged goods, can’t get a man, and are stuck with kids and poor employment prospects, while real widowers are free to trade up to trophy wives by exploiting the pity and female interest that their status instantly achieves)?
Which is more dramatic, the widow who resigns herself to the sexless, soul shattering drudgery of single motherhood, or the one who gets it on with her dead hubby’s ruggedly handsome best friend (who also loves kids and is just thrilled to take care of somebody elses)? The widower who remarries the first 19yo Hooter’s girl who catches his fancy and sends the kids to boarding school, or the one that re-evaluates his whole life and devotes it to the sensitive, clever children that he never knew?
Hardly insidious. Just standard Hollywood wish-fulfilment. Most movies are about people who do the opposite of what was expected of them.
johnnyhongkong added these pithy words on Oct 08 07 at 3:06 pmI know. It was just really weird to see two previews back to back showing a happy couple and then the title card: “and then he died.” It was almost as weird seeing the card “From the writer of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’” to sell the new Katherine Heigel movie about being a bridesmaid 29 times.
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