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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
In Michael Apted's sad, hopeful and deeply moving new documentary series on marriage in America," "I do" isn't a happy ending -- but rather an uncertain beginning.
Jun 15, 2002 | Weddings have become routine prime-time entertainment lately, like sitcoms or shows about people who voluntarily get into cages with rats. Morning news shows host win-a-wedding spectaculars, in which couples are fêted with all-expenses-paid ceremonies in exchange for letting audiences vote on the bride's hairdo. Networks devise win-a-spouse shows like Fox's "Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska" and ABC's "The Bachelor," both of which have sequels in the works.
Meanwhile, the current administration proposes spending $300 million on promoting marriage among the poor (perhaps we have "Who Wants to Marry a Welfare Recipient So She'll Get to Keep Her Benefits?" to look forward to), despite statistical evidence that some 92 percent of Americans already get married at least once in their lives. Even as the multibillion-dollar marriage industry continues to balloon, showing no apparent signs of slowdown despite an economic downturn, the divorce rate still hovers at around 50 percent.
Given all that, English director Michael Apted's new series, "Married in America," which premieres on A&E on Monday, June 17, might at first mention seem not so fresh. In fact, however, the series might serve as a useful reminder that a wedding is not a game-show prize. When "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" reared its head in 2000, it was still possible to gape and squeal and even think of something original to say about the spectacle of a 34-year-old emergency room nurse in the last bloom of a reasonable facsimile of youth agreeing to marry a creepy, lantern-jawed stranger on national TV mere moments after setting eyes upon him for the first time. Just two years later, such a spectacle retains about as much power to shock as an early Lumière brothers film of a train arriving at a station. The only surprising thing about watching five little Miss Havishams in full bridal drag trek up the side of a frozen mountain in the opening shots of "Bachelorettes in Alaska" is its lack of power to elicit any emotion stronger than mild schadenfreude.
Weddings, it seems, have become such potent signifiers that Americans are loath to miss out on them. It's that one special day when you get to show everybody that somebody loves you enough to make a really big, obscenely expensive, highly ritualized and perhaps even nationally broadcast deal out of it. Mercifully, there is no resemblance between Apted's series and the spate of bridesploitation shows that have lately been trotted out on the small screen, save that the "ultimate goal" of such shows is essentially Apted's point of departure.
In a phone interview, Apted balks at the comparison: "To put them in the same breath is horrifying," he says. He has a point -- but then, we have a trend.
Apted's first longitudinal documentary since his famed "Seven Up" series -- launched in 1964 when he interviewed a group of 7-year-old British schoolchildren and then checked up on them every seven years thereafter -- "Married in America" takes us inside the lives of nine very different couples as they enter into marriage. The couples, all of whom live in or near New York, Los Angeles or Birmingham, Ala., hail from varying ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Some are interfaith unions, some are interracial, and one couple is lesbian. There are second marriages, age differences, income discrepancies, and children from other unions. Nearly all the couples have at least one set of divorced parents, and a surprising number of fathers are estranged from their grown-up kids. One twice-divorced, twice-imprisoned groom could be speaking for all the couples when he says of his own relationship, "We each brought a lot of baggage to the relationship. So we put the bags on the table and rifled through them."
Asked why he chose marriage as the subject of his second long-term documentary project, Apted says, "I've always had a gossipy interest in how people meet, fall in love, get married, and then what happens and all that. And I think, on a more political level, as a visitor to this country, I was interested in the way politicians put the ideas of family values out. And yet I was seeing all these statistics about divorce and single parents. So I wondered: What was the real story here?"
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