[COLUMN] This Awards Season, Marriage is a Trap | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

There is an interesting moment, late in Oppenheimer, as Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) prepares to testify in front of the Gray Board. Her husband, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), has been accused of communist sympathies, which would derail his career and disgrace him. For most of the movie, Kitty has been presented as a functioning alcoholic, unreliable and erratic. Her husband’s lawyer, Lloyd K. Garrison (Macon Blair), urges his client not to let Kitty testify.

Robert dismisses Lloyd’s concerns. “Only a fool or an adolescent presumes to know someone else’s relationship, and you’re neither, Lloyd,” Robert chides his counsel. “Kitty and I are grown-ups. We’ve walked through fire together. She’ll do fine.” Ultimately, Kitty does more than fine. She tears through the cross-examination from de facto prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) in one of the movie’s barnstorming sequences.

However, up until around half-way through the testimony, there’s a great deal of tension about whether Kitty will come through. Oppenheimer is fascinated by the idea that human beings are inherently unknowable, even to themselves. Kitty’s rousing defense of her husband is one of the film’s most optimistic and humanist moments, suggesting that perhaps this married couple truly can know and understand each other. It also gets at one of the big themes of the past year in movies.

There has been much discussion of the return of sex to mainstream cinema, particularly in movies like Fair Play, Cat Person and The Royal Hotel. Interestingly, those three movies all present sex in a way that frames physical intimacy as dangerous, blurring boundaries in provocative ways. While there has undoubtedly been a resurgence of the erotic thriller, there is another cinematic trend operating in parallel. Increasingly, films seem to suggest that emotional intimacy can be just as risky.

A surprising amount of this year’s awards contenders explore marriage as a fundamentally dangerous proposition. Of course, there’s arguably nothing new in this. Marriage has always been a subject of literary fascination. There are plenty of great movies about characters navigating the complicated dynamics of a troubled or dysfunctional marriage, from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut to David Fincher’s Gone Girl. However, the theme is particularly pronounced this awards season.

Sometimes that danger is literal, as in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, in which an author (Sandra Hüller) finds herself placed on trial following the death of her husband (Samuel Theis). The couple’s marriage is interrogated and probed, but the film refuses to offer any concrete answers as to whether the husband was murdered or committed suicide. Either way, the home is presented as a site of violence, passive aggression boiling over into full-throated arguments.

Of course, marriage is often a metaphor for something larger. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a portrait of white supremacy as masculinity in crisis, but that crisis expresses itself dramatically through the marriage between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Ernest poisons his wife’s insulin to keep her bedridden and dependent. He claims to love her. Watching the movie, it’s possible that he even believes it himself.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon treats Napoleon Bonaparte’s (Joaquin Phoenix) conquest of Europe as an expression of the frustration that he feels in his marriage to the Empress Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). She serves as the most consistent motivator for Napoleon’s actions, from his abandonment of a campaign in Africa to his return from exile. Setting foot on European soil again, the deposed ruler bends down to kiss the sand, as if to equate the continent with the woman that he can truly have.

It has been noted that many of the year’s “great man” biopics, including Oppenheimer and Napoleon, place a greater emphasis than usual on the central marriage. Michael Mann’s Ferrari takes place during a very turbulent period in the life on Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), but it hinges his troubled marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz), who is introduced firing a literal gun at his head and spends most of movie pointing a metaphorical gun at his head with her control of the company’s stock.

Enzo and Laura live in a fundamentally broken marriage. The two have never recovered from the loss of their son, Dino (Benedetto Benedettini). Enzo and Laura cannot even visit Dino’s grave together. Enzo slips out every night to be with his second family, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Pierro (Giuseppe Festinese), racing to get home to morning coffee. However, Enzo and Laura seem stuck with one another. Neither seems to seriously consider the possibility of ending the marriage.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro has been criticized for not hitting all of the expected beats in a classic biopic, instead focusing on the relationship and marriage between Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). As in most of these movies, there is a question of the extent to which these characters can claim to truly understand each other. At two separate points in the movie, the couple sit with their backs to each other, trying to guess what the other is thinking.

“I know exactly who you are,” Felicia tells Leonard on accepting his marriage proposal. She knows that he is a gay man, and that – even if he loves her – it will not be a conventional union. However, it becomes clear that Felicia might be aware of the facts, the emotional reality is a different thing. “It’s my own arrogance to think I could survive on what he could give,” she admits in hindsight. Insisting that she had “always known” who she married, she asks, “Who’s the one who hasn’t been honest?”

While both Ferrari and Maestro are built around dysfunctional marriages, they offer some small amount of optimism. Even if these characters can never truly understand one another, they can love each other. As in Oppenheimer, both spouses come through. In Ferrari, Laura rallies around Enzo after a spectacular disaster threatens to destroy his company. In Maestro, Leonard lovingly tends to Felicia after she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. There is love there, even amid the ambiguity.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is more cynical. Pregnant woman Victoria Blessington (Emma Stone) commits suicide to escape her abusive husband Alfie (Christopher Abbott). Mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) recovers the body, replacing the brain with that of the baby. Victoria is reborn as Bella. When Godwin arranges for Bella to marry Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), she chooses to abscond and enjoy her freedom. The movie’s third act finds Alfie returning to reclaim his wife.

The theme simmers through a number of other awards contenders in ways both major and minor. In Celine Song’s Past Lives, Nora’s (Greta Lee) marriage to Arthur (John Magaro) is disturbed by the return of her childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). In Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is confronted by the reality that his parents’ marriage was deeply dysfunctional.

There are examples where marriages are actively unsettling and abusive. Todd Haynes’ May December is loosely inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the story of a teacher (Julianne Moore) who fell in love with and married her student (Charles Melton). Although Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple is based on a musical based on a movie based on a book, it returns time and again to the idea of the home as a site of violence, particularly between a married couple.

The trend even extends beyond the year’s big awards movies. The central romance between Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is not a marriage. However, it feels strangely of a piece with these portrayals of marriage. Coriolanus and Lucy Gray are thrown together by circumstances, and often unknowable to one another. “Is this real?” Coriolanus asks Lucy Gray at one point. The movie is somewhat cynical.

It seems like there was definitely something in the air, simmering through so much of the year’s pop culture. These recurring trends were unlikely to be intentional. These scripts would have been in development for extended periods, and it’s unlikely that many of the writers ever talked about the way that they were exploring these dysfunctional marriages. However, some of them may have been responding – consciously or otherwise – to larger trends.

These films might be understood as part of the legacy of the recent global pandemic, a period in which many couples found themselves forced to live together in a confined space for an extended period of time. This may explain the recent wave of movies that capture that sense of relationship claustrophobia, such as Sem Levinson’s Malcolm and Marie or Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind. For many of these couples, being placed in such proximity was challenging and unprecedented.

Under these conditions, the marriage rate spiked, leading to “the great pandemic wedding boom.” However, the pandemic also seemed to lead to a corresponding increase in divorce filings. Without work or travel to break up their exposure to one another, many couples were truly tested. Under intense pressure, issues like addiction and depression could alter familiar dynamics to the point that long-term partners could feel that they were suddenly “living with a stranger.”

It really does feel like at least some of these movies are part of a long tail of this pandemic anxiety, grappling with the fears and uncertainties that can underpin relationships defined by these high-pressure situations. Consistently across this year’s awards contenders, there’s a palpable fear that marriage is a trap. Even the most optimistic of these films are worried that even intimate partners are fundamentally unknowable to one another when (or perhaps until) the chips are down.

Marriage has long been a subject of fascination for popular cinema, perhaps because the institution is recognizable to so many members of the audience. This year’s awards slate is an interesting addition to a long tradition that includes movies like Kramer vs. Kramer or Marriage Story. However, it also speaks to this particular moment in a very charged and interesting way.