Strangers

A pastor once said that it’s foolishness going into a marriage looking for someone to complete you, only God can do that. Marriage will grow you but not through the process that you’d think. If you have any flaws you know of in your single season then it’s best to work on them at that time before you get to marriage. Marriage will be a magnifying glass to any flaws that you have and flaws that you didn’t know that you had.

In the early parts of this movie I thought that a great name for the film would have been “the first year”; and then the writer duly informed us that these two characters had been married for more than a year – so at this point, my dear, na craze.

Strangers is the story of a couple trying to live together but most of their attempts ends up in days and nights of fighting. Time and time again the fighting gets out of control and reaches into their work life and other relationships.

The first half of this movie does a beautiful thing in s howing that these people are just that – people. They are not inherently bad and they are just like the rest of us but they are unable to communicate. You see it in the moments after each fight. There’s just a look, a hurried ‘sorry’ and then they jump on each other and never actually take out time to talk to each other.

This is just one of their many issues that arise at different points of the movie, it could be said that both of them have anger management issues, entitlement issues and OCD issues – needless to say, they both need a shrink pronto.

And then comes the second half, at this point we loose track of why they are fighting or what the trigger for the current argument is and you also stop caring and can’t wait for the end to come. So the thing the movie does well at this point is to not stretch the ending.

The quality of the movie as far as production and writing is very consistent in both halves, however, the one reason why the end gets less credit is because it’s the same back and forth over and over again. Credit has to be given to Mary and Kenneth for holding the audience in rapt attention (at least in the first half) in scenes that consisted of just the two of them.

The movie is not perfection (I mean… it did take me a while to get past the pink walls and the interesting floor tile pattern) but it is well told and a great conversation starter on the realities of marriage.