Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review – compelling portrait of a passionate marriage
From serious injury and coping with different levels of fame to resentment and ping-pong – a powerful insight into a life shared by two charismatic creativesIt’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. Certainly, having got to know affable, driven, sweet-tempered Joel personally in this intimate portrait, it’s a natural desire to want to see even more of his extraordinary work: 60 years of photographs encompassing street photography, official documentation of the 9/11 disaster site in New York, still lifes and more.At the same time, it’s also entirely apt that this feature isn’t just an adjunct to Meyerowitz’s career, given it is so profoundly about Joel and Maggie’s marriage, a kind of passionate truce (as its title suggests) between two equally forceful and charismatic characters. As we see here, the two struggle with the way Joel’s fame and career so often overshadow Maggie’s, personally and professionally. It’s a constant push-pull friction-producing mechanism that suddenly flares up into a massive dressing down from a furious Maggie, invoking decades worth of resentments and slights, when Joel carelessly refuses to take a phone call in another room from the one she’s resting in. The sequence is pure magic: fascinating, compelling and repellent in equal measure, spontaneous and just a bit performative too. It’s the kind of material that’s a cinematic Rorschach blot, capable of being read any which way, depending on the viewer’s perspective. And how apt it is that the film was itself made by a married couple, Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter – who, like Maggie and Joel, come from different cultures and disciplinary backgrounds. Continue reading...
From serious injury and coping with different levels of fame to resentment and ping-pong – a powerful insight into a life shared by two charismatic creatives
It’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. Certainly, having got to know affable, driven, sweet-tempered Joel personally in this intimate portrait, it’s a natural desire to want to see even more of his extraordinary work: 60 years of photographs encompassing street photography, official documentation of the 9/11 disaster site in New York, still lifes and more.
At the same time, it’s also entirely apt that this feature isn’t just an adjunct to Meyerowitz’s career, given it is so profoundly about Joel and Maggie’s marriage, a kind of passionate truce (as its title suggests) between two equally forceful and charismatic characters. As we see here, the two struggle with the way Joel’s fame and career so often overshadow Maggie’s, personally and professionally. It’s a constant push-pull friction-producing mechanism that suddenly flares up into a massive dressing down from a furious Maggie, invoking decades worth of resentments and slights, when Joel carelessly refuses to take a phone call in another room from the one she’s resting in. The sequence is pure magic: fascinating, compelling and repellent in equal measure, spontaneous and just a bit performative too. It’s the kind of material that’s a cinematic Rorschach blot, capable of being read any which way, depending on the viewer’s perspective. And how apt it is that the film was itself made by a married couple, Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter – who, like Maggie and Joel, come from different cultures and disciplinary backgrounds. Continue reading...
