“The Lovers” may be the most European film ever made about marriage in America. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs (“Terri”) is an avowed fan of Ingmar Bergman, whose seminal Swedish films about the relations between men and women defined cinematic matrimony for a generation of filmgoers.
Mr. Jacobs, a pleasant but somewhat eccentric 45-year-old with wiry hair reminiscent of Tim Burton’s, said he and his wife got married on their 10th anniversary — without any attendant fanfare.
“Do we go to the same Indian restaurant or do we mark it?” he told The Washington Times of the decision to make his union official. “At the same time, there is this weight of suddenly we are now pronouncing that we have publicly made a contract with each other.”
In Mr. Jacobs’ film, opening this weekend in the District, Tracy Letts and three-time Oscar nominee Debra Winger star as Michael and Mary, a middle-aged suburban couple going through the motions of a lengthy union. But unbeknownst to either party, both Michael and Mary are each having extramarital affairs.
Mr. Jacobs then tosses in a perversely brilliant twist: The affairs abruptly reignite the passion in Mary and Michael’s marriage, with each thinking the other has been faithful the entire time.
“This is not my story,” Mr. Jacobs says, adding that both his own marriage and his parents’ remain sound.
“I am looking for stories where people are not villains or victims, and the idea that these people are doing something simultaneously that kind of balanced out what they were doing to each other,” he said. “That seemed like a really good jumping-off place.”
Mr. Letts and Miss Winger smolder in their ironic chemistry, and Mr. Jacobs doesn’t shy from showing middle-aged lovemaking not as the bait for comedy, but for pathos and humanity.
“I like that it was a depiction of people in their middle age who weren’t done,” Mr. Letts, a veteran of the Philip Roth adaptation “Indignation” as well as “Homeland” and “Divorce” — and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “August: Osage County” — said of his role.
“So often in the popular culture, when we do depict elderly people having sexual lives, it’s shown as a kind of joke because we’re youth-obsessed,” Mr. Letts said. “I don’t suggest it will change, but you look for those examples that run contrary to that.”
“The Lovers” is by turns poignant and humorous. Mr. Jacobs shows great care in crafting the situations without resorting to melodrama. Later in the film the couple’s son Joel (Tyler Ross) is set to bring home his girlfriend Erin (Jessica Sula), and both Michael and Mary have told their lovers they will inform the family then that the marriage is over.
What could have turned into a screwball scenario — Mr. Jacobs freely admits Howard Hawks as one of his influences — at first instills in the viewer the sense that maybe, just maybe, the film will end one way.
But Mr. Jacobs has more up his sleeve.
“I think we’re at this place where we’re seeing reflections of marriage in films and TV,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think that we have an understanding of the kind of challenges” of maintaining a lifelong union, he said.
“So often we see movies about people that age and the assumption made is that they achieved whatever they’re going to achieve and they’re settled,” Mr. Letts, now 51, and who only married for the first time a few years ago, said. (“I like being married,” he said.)
“That’s not my experience of the world,” Mr. Letts said. “That’s not the experience of other people my age. I see people still working, still struggling, still striving. I see a lot of mistakes, just the way it was 20 years ago, 40 years ago.”
Mr. Jacobs said he always envisioned Mary and Michael as being in their fifties, and there was no temptation when he was writing “The Lovers” to make them his contemporaries or even younger.
“I think people really like sitting with something familiar at whatever age you’re at,” Mr. Jacobs said, adding that he wrote specifically with Miss Winger in mind for Mary. “What’s shocking [to audiences] is to see [characters] in this kind of way that doesn’t resemble their lives at all.”
“It’s so appropriate that there are middle-aged people being shown still in process,” Mr. Letts added.
Mr. Letts, as a playwright, says he is often asked what happens to characters after the curtain closes. The same, he said, is true of Mary and Michael in “The Lovers.”
“I never know the answer to that,” he said.
Mr. Jacobs said what’s more important than what happens after the closing credits are the issues raised by the film itself, and that audiences leave pondering how the film relates to their own lives.
“I think about my relationship from the beginning to now: I’m a different person; she’s a different person,” Mr. Jacobs said of his own marriage. “So the idea that we’re just hoping that it’s going to be in sync with each other for the rest of our lives is [just] an idea.”
Much like trying to put order to chaos, marriage too could be seen as a way of trying to create permanency in a universe ruled by entropy.
“We’re [all] trying to make something permanent in something that’s so impermanent,” Mr. Jacobs said.
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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