COUPLES’ MOVIES NOT ALWAYS A DUD
Sure, you’ve got Gigli and By the Sea, but you’ve also got hits like Fargo and Knocked Up
By the Sea, directed by Angelina Jolie and starring her husband, Brad Pitt, opens in theatres on Friday. Already it’s been compared to Gigli, the 2003 Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez flick that many critics described as the worst movie ever. But directing your significant other isn’t necessarily a recipe for cinematic catastrophe, as some of these examples make clear.
FARGO
Director: Joel Coen Star: Frances McDormand
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94 per cent McDormand won an Academy Award for her performance in Fargo (1996).
She and Coen met when she auditioned for Blood Simple in 1983 and married the next year. At the Rome Film Festival in October, reporters asked McDormand for the secret to a lasting relationship. “I think it’s having different stories to tell each other,” she said.
SWEPT AWAY
Director: Guy Ritchie Star: Madonna
Rotten Tomatoes score: 5 per cent “Both husband and wife seem to be in way over their heads,” read one of the more charitable reviews of Swept
Away (2002). Madonna plays an American socialite who makes life difficult for a communist Italian sailor on a yachting holiday. Their relationship takes a turn after they are shipwrecked. It proved to be Madonna and Ritchie’s last movie collaboration: They divorced in 2008.
HUSBANDS AND WIVES
Director: Woody Allen Star: Mia Farrow
Rotten Tomatoes score: 100 A textbook example of why it’s risky to make a film with your partner. With only a few days left of shooting
Husbands and Wives (1992), Farrow discovered that her boyfriend, Allen, was having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Producer Robert Greenhut said it took him “two or three days” to persuade Farrow to come back to work. “Her reaction was there’s absolutely no way I could see this person anymore,” he said in Woody Allen: A Documenta
ry (2012). Before their acrimonious split, Farrow and Allen worked on 13 films together.
SWEENEY TODD
Director: Tim Burton Star: Helena Bonham Carter
Rotten Tomatoes score: 86 per cent
After 13 years, two kids and many movies — including this 2007 film starring Johnny Depp — Bonham Carter and Burton split in 2014. “Our relationship was always somewhat special and I think it’ll always remain special,” she said recently in an interview with Red. “And really, the mark of a successful relationship shouldn’t be whether you’re there forever after.”
Director: Judd Apatow Star: Leslie Mann
Rotten Tomatoes score: 90 per cent Leslie Mann plays Paul Rudd’s wife in Knocked Up (2007) and This Is 40 (2012). The director told Good Morn
ing America he felt “uncomfortable” watching his wife and Rudd . . . get into character. “I keep saying, ‘Why do I keep writing sex scenes for Paul Rudd and my wife?’ I should actually omit them from the script.”
Director: Darren Aronofsky Star: Rachel Weisz Rotten Tomatoes score: 51 per cent
The director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, and the Cambridgeeducated actress announced their engagement in 2005. They had a son a year later but never wed. In 2010, they split after nine years together.
The Fountain (2006) divided critics. “A metaphysical muddle,” said one unhappy reviewer.
Weisz married James Bond star Daniel Craig in a small, private ceremony in 2011. Husband and wife starred in the Broadway play Betrayal, the second biggest nonmusical hit of 2013.