45 Years (2015)

I drank the Kool-Aid on this one. I discussed who would receive the five Best Actress Academy Award nominations in many of my previous reviews. I kept including Charlotte Rampling (Melancholia, The Eye of the Storm) as one of the five based on everything I had been reading. I regret including her name, but, in my defense, January 29th was the very first chance I had to see 45 Years. I saw it a day later, and I am uncertain what I just saw. I love heavy dramas and movies about broken relationships. I also like slow, methodical movies if they are building towards something. The pieces were in place for 45 Years, but this movie ultimately didn’t do it for me. I realize I am in the minority when I give it a less-than-average review. Nevertheless, it earned a stellar 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I don’t like using this excuse (mainly because I’m no spring chicken), but I may have been too young to truly appreciate this movie. I want to think that I am not. I have a deep appreciation for movies about aging in general or movies about couples dealing with life-altering experiences. I adore the film Away From Here. I love About Schmidt. Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, and Amour are also movies that I admire. And while it is a different type of aging movie, I believe The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one of the best love stories ever told on screen is one of the best 100 movies ever made. In each of the five movies mentioned above, at least one actor or actress (and in many cases more than one) received a nomination for an acting award. Each was deserving. I have nothing against Rampling, and I went into this movie thinking I would see one of the three or four best performances by a leading actress all year, but her performance failed to meet my expectations. Now that I have seen all of the contenders, I believe Carey Mulligan (Suffragette) deserved the final nomination for Best Actress this year.

45 Years was a frustrating movie. I am willing to give any film that I see in the theater its fair amount of time to capture me. This is one of the reasons I try to see as many movies in the theater as possible. But, to me, 45 Years wasn’t building towards anything. Perhaps I am too young to appreciate the intricacies of this movie, and I haven’t been married before, but I didn’t feel Rampling’s confusion and pain the way that I felt I was supposed to.

I understand feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. I know these feelings perfectly. And I know that these are two of the strongest and most uncontrollable human emotions there are. Feelings of jealousy and inadequacy do not change with age. They can hit an 8-year-old child just as strongly as they can a 98-year-old on their deathbed. However, the story of Kate (Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay – The Dresser, Doctor Zhivago) is unique. A week before the couple is to celebrate its 45th wedding anniversary, Geoff receives a letter stating that the body of his former lover Katya has been discovered in a crevasse on a Swiss mountain near the Italian border. In 1962, Katya fell through a crack in a glacier while the couple was hiking the Swiss Alps. The body has been perfectly preserved (frozen in time, if you will), and Katya looks like she did in 1962, when she was 27 years old.

Kate’s feelings of insecurity are just that – Katya’s previous conversations with Geoff and Kate were brief and very long ago – so much so that Geoff even has to mention to Kate that “I’ve told you about her before.” We don’t know a ton about the 45-year marriage between Geoff and Kate other than that they never had any children and that the two of them never really took any photographs together. Their lovely little house is situated in a village in the English countryside so that you won’t find many pictures. Just as the couple decided never to have any children, they also chose not to fill their house with pictures of themselves. They are retired now, Kate from teaching, Geoff from managing an engineering company. Financially the couple is living comfortably, and before the news of Katya, it is believed that they were

This was where the wheels fell off. I realize that this is the third time I have brought this up, but it is essential to understand this story. Insecurity, inadequacy, and jealousy are innate in all of us. Unfortunately, these traits rear their ugly heads more regularly and with more ferocity than we would like. These were opportunities where director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, television’s Looking) missed the boat. We were supposed to see these emotions through Kate the more that Geoff tells her about Katya. We understand that the two were set to be married and would have been married if not for the accident.

Kate begins to see herself as nothing more than an alternative. Again, this is entirely understandable. Why would anybody want to be second place? She begins examing the past 45 years of their marriage and questioning everything. Again, this is something that I think is understandable. I think all of us can empathize with the situation. None of us want to hear of her significant other’s past lovers. Most of us just aren’t conditioned to accept hearing loving words that our partner has about a previous lover. What Kate feels is normal. For me, the problem was that Geoff never gloated about Katya or made Kate feel like she was a substitute. The news he received was shocking to him, and he was trying to balance these conflicting emotions. I never felt like he was a jerk about it. I actually felt like he was doing a great job of trying to make sense of everything. In addition to maybe being too young to appreciate this movie fully, perhaps it was also that I saw it through the lens of a man while half of the audience saw it through the lens of a woman.

If Geoff had made Kate feel less important, there would have been more of a story, and I could have sympathized with Kate more. I can understand that some might say the movie entirely differently than me and say that he made her feel less through his actions. My counterargument would be that he was trying to make sense of the situation and put closure on something that occurred 50 years ago. While I don’t discredit her feelings, I wish I could have better seen their roots, either through direct actions from Geoff or from better displays of agony, frustration, jealousy from Kate. Everything felt underwhelming, and I left this movie wondering what could have been. I thought that I understood the story well enough. I also thought that I understood the emotions felt by the two lead characters, but nothing I saw justified things for me. There wasn’t enough of an action-consequence type of feeling, and I left the movie wondering if I felt everything

This movie was a miss.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 7.5/10 (giant misses here)
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 8.5/10 (Rampling was good…not great…and certainly not Academy Award-great in my opinion)
Screenplay 6/10
Directing 7/10 (there needed to be something more for me to feel what I think Andrew Haigh wanted me to feel)
Cinematography 8/10 (beautifully shot in the couple’s tiny house that feels like it is getting smaller and smaller with each passing scene)
Sound 9/10 (haunting at times)
Hook and Reel 6/10 (so slow with no payoff)
Universal Relevance 9/10 (the intent was there. I am willing to accept that there are others out there who were far more affected by this film than I was)
76%

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