“That’s How Strong My Love Is” - Roland Gift
So I used to firmly believe that you could tell a lot about your compatibility with a partner or potential suitor by their reaction to Beautiful Girls and High Fidelity.
Not just whether they liked these movies (let’s assume you’re not dating the comatose or those with chronically impaired good taste). No, what I’m talking about is who they related to in these films and the judgment (or lack thereof) that they took away from them.
The first time I watched Beautiful Girls, I felt Timothy Hutton‘s restlessness - his indescribable, senseless but still palpable restlessness - with a thousand volts of empathy. The movie’s unrest was never about other women, exactly. At least not in my indulgent mind. It was about….another life maybe? About possibilities traded and searches abandoned…and not being able to vanquish either of those concepts from your mind.
Hutton’s interlude with Uma in that nook of an ice fishing house at midnight was so much more a manifestation of that fear then a cause.
Look at how he could fall a little in love with a 13 year old Natalie Portman. It wasn’t pedophilia, because it wasn’t about the immediacy of a moment or seizing some lurid opportunity. It was about this siren call of an epiphany – that a mind like Natalie’s existed in this parallel universe, a hundred years and a hundred miles from Willie Conway’s piano bar and the bed he makes up with his too-good-for-him-but-that-is-beside-the-point lawyer girlfriend.
It’s not about who is good. Who you ought to be with, I thought so indignantly at 22 and maybe still now, it is about what the heart wants….and the injustice you do when you tie that heart down to “shoulds” and unfelt routines and pragmatic domesticity. When you abandon the wildness of that heart that cares only for Wants, for Can’t Live Withouts, for those whose banter and peculiarity and beauty and fire leaves you breathless on an elementary school ice rink.
I am going to tell you that it is not a popular opinion to support Willie to any degree. To secretly hope that he would leave the lawyer and wait six years for Portman. Or leave his life and his lawyer and Marty too – and choose to find something else to believe in again.
Yes the movie is full of men who come off as assholes. The same men in this world who torment incredible women with their “selfish” hesitations. And yes, all the film’s women are propped up as creatures of Simplicity and Goodness – these utterly uncomplicated and lovely devotees.
I hope the world is not that clear cut by gender; Or if it is, it shouldn’t be. Yeah, the movie can break your heart and it’s tempting to categorize it as a fairly accurate portrayal of men’s Grass is Greener Syndrome.
But what if part of the issue is not the green grasses they (or we!) can’t commit to and love as they deserve but the overwhelming tendency to make a home on the first decent patch of lawn we come to. Or the one we’re on at 32.
Maybe we’re so afraid of moving on or so tired of packing up that we put down leases on grass that - if we really searched ourselves and were cruelly honest we’d have to admit – we have no damn business claiming.
Maybe we misinterpreted the cautionary tale in Beautiful Girls. Maybe we are too in love with a happy ending – and the safety of knowing that Willie did the Right Thing and didn’t jilt the Nice Woman with whom he had created a promise of a life. Maybe it is unbearably terrifying to think that the right thing might be listening to doubts, to warning signs, to discontent instead of spending a lifetime taming them in order to fit in to the script someone else wrote for your life. Or a fair approximation of the life you wanted.
It’s not that I think all men are right to leave (or women for that matter). It’s that I doubt the wisdom in wanting or convincing a wanderlustful mate to stay. Let me tell you I admire commitment fiercely; but what one Ought To Do – at least in my mind – is only half of that commitment. Committing to a lifetime with someone because you feel obligated is just the skeleton of love. None of the heart, none of the blood, none of the marrow I want from you.
I’m more than ten years older now than I was the first time I watched it and maybe I’m due another viewing. But I suspect as much as I’d like to judge Willie and his quixotic wanderings in to that snowy sleepy town, part of me will still believe he just deserves to be set free. But no, that is too passive. Part of me will still believe that he has a duty to set himself free.
These are all still theories… I don’t know if the grass is greener and I don’t know how long you roam trying to determine that. I suppose there is the chance that you’ll wake up one day and realize you passed the right lot a dozen irreclaimable years back.
But I do know – and will always believe – that as long as you wonder so fiercely if it is greener elsewhere, you aren’t home yet.
And that’s fair to admit.
