Search - Married in America 2 on DVD

The World Is Enough

Found Highways | Las Vegas | 08/16/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"All the reviews of Married in America 2 are accurate--this documentary film (and the series it's part of) is addictive and compelling. The stories about the marriages of these nine couples are irresistible because they're true.

Just as interesting as the documentary itself is a forty-minute interview with Michael Apted about why and how he went about making this series.

Apted distinguishes between two kinds of films that he makes--"movies" and "documentaries." He started his career in Britain in the 1960s making sociological TV documentaries like the 7 Up series (the model for Married in America and Married in America 2).

But he's also made star-driven Hollywood movies like Coal Miner's Daughter with Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones, Continental Divide (John Belushi's only decent film), Gorky Park with William Hurt, Gorillas in the Mist with Sigourney Weaver, The World Is Not Enough with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, the British-American TV series Rome, and the movie Amazing Grace about the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.

Apted can make historical drama (sometimes called "heritage film" in Britain) seem realistic--not merely trivia like the color of the togas, but the way people in another time think and talk. (The question of whether a historical movie could actually be true takes up several shelves in a university library and can probably be reduced to the answer, "No.")

Apted is like other foreign directors--Percy Adlon (Bagdad Cafe, Rosalie Goes Shopping), Peter Weir (Witness), and Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas)--who are drawn to American cultures because of their strangeness (or their uniqueness, if you want to be nonjudgmental about it). Of course, Hollywood is also where the money is.

In an improvement over the first films in the Up series, Apted has small video cameras and unobtrusive sound recording equipment so we can follow the couples as they go out and live their lives rather than just watch them sitting on a couch talking about themselves.

Even so, these snapshots of nine marriages every few years only hint at the lives that are unfolding every day.
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