14. Three Colours: White (1994)
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s second instalment in his “Three Colours Trilogy” stands out from the others which are mainly French while this is primarily Polish. This comedy-drama art film centres on the second of the three political ideals that the trilogy is based on – equality.
Also unlike the other two, the film takes the perspective of a shy Polish man Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who is left by his wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) since he could not consummate the marriage. The opening scene is humiliating, not only due to the reason for the divorce, but because since he is not fluent in French, he needs to learn everything she is saying against him through a translator, including that she no longer loves him.
He loses the beauty salon they owned jointly, his residence and the rest of his cash and is soon left to be a beggar in a Paris Métro station. He meets another Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos) who offers him a job – to kill a suicidal person who’s too afraid to kill himself. Karol becomes brutally determined to become rich, learn French and ruin Dominique.
Like Blue (whose star Juliette Binoche accidentally enters the court room during their divorce proceedings as an interlinking cameo) the film’s cinematography heavily relies on the titular “White”, using the shining sky, the Polish snowscape and clothes like Julie Delpy’s flashbacked wedding dress. It is commonly interpreted as being an “anti-comedy”, similarly with “Blue” being an “anti-tragedy” and “Red” being an “antirom”.
15. Boyhood (2014)
This independent coming-of-age drama spans across twelve years (real-time) and is a testament to Mason Evans Jr.’s (Ellar Coltrane) childhood from when he was six-years-old to when he is eighteen. From the beginning of the film, their parents are already divorced and the kids seem well adjusted and live with their mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), but they miss their dad (Ethan Hawke) who has relocated to Alaska and haven’t seen in one and a half years.
However, once Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater – Richard Linklater’s actual daughter) move to Houston so that their mother can continue her education, they reunite with their father who starts to see them on a regular basis on every other weekend, and summers.
There’s a scene at the bowling alley where Samantha recalls the two of them shouting and fighting back from when they were still married. Mason Sr. tries to explain how despite their shouting, they still loved each other and asks if she remembers all the fun times they had together as a family. She doesn’t.
Linklater’s film is laced with realism because its roots are based on a mixture of his own, Hawke’s and Arquette’s family. A variation of this conversation has happened in many people’s homes, many diners and many bowling alleys. The divorce didn’t shake them as much as most people assume, as with everything, people adapt, and children are actually way better at it than adults.
There’s not too much exposition about their lives before their divorce only that they married early on because she got pregnant (and this information is sandwiched between a hilariously awkward sex-talk between Mason Sr. and Samantha). The divorce, going back and forth between parents and having “fine” days where “not much happens” is the norm. They move on, and so do their parents, with passing girlfriends and boyfriends and eventually becoming part of blended family.
Richard Linklater began his project back in 2002 with only a couple of main plot points, the ending and four actors who were not even contract-bound. He wrote the script for each year’s filming after re-watching the previous year’s footage and reworking in timely phenomena that were happening at the time (like the midnight release of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”) that the audience could bond with, together with incorporating each actor’s opinions or life experiences.
The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, winning Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Arquette. It also received six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Arquette, which she won.
16. Irreconcilable Differences (1984)
Opening scene – a lawyer is advising his client about divorce, if they are sure, if there are any alternative means of action, that there’s no going back – and then the audience sees the client sitting on a chair too big for her – a little post-“E.T” Drew Barrymore who is calm and ready to “divorce” her parents (i.e. emancipate).
However, it’s not her divorce the film focuses on, but rather her parent’s divorce, that has changed them so much so that little Barrymore wants to break up with them (ironic since she actually did later emancipate from her parents in real life).
Shelley Long and Ryan O’Neal play her parents who are honest, loving and eventually successful co-working screenwriters (with Albert, the father, also becoming a popular director too). They develop a taste for the attention and decide to make another movie about a beautiful woman. Enter Sharon Stone and a lot of trouble, as always.
Albert leaves his wife for his new actress and she leaves the movie project all together, leaving her homeless, jobless and very mad. Basically the two parents constantly seesaw between being busy and successful and being depressed with some financial difficulty.
Leaving the little girl overlooked and ignored by her parents unless they use her as their own carrier pigeon to transfer hate mail to each other. The only person she seems to trust and feels loved by is the family’s maid so when she sues for divorce, she wants to give the maid custody.
Hollywood strips the couple of parental responsibility and instead forces budgetary pressures, time limits, and media controversy into their lives, and they are willing participants in all of it. They choose to finish deadlines instead of taking care of their kid, because she’s not going anywhere right?
17. It’s Complicated (2009)
Nancy Meyer’s film may not be grounded in empathetic realism since the characters try to act like they are the everyday, typical people with rent to pay and love problems but not many can feel too sorry for anyone with a huge house all by themselves and a hotel grade kitchen which seems to not be big or good enough.
Nothing can be enough for Jane, not a kitchen or even ten years to get over her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) after he cheated and left her for a much younger woman (Lake Bell) who has a constant scowl on her face. But it’s Meryl Streep with a bakery so despite the fact that most people don’t find themselves in these characters’ situations, it doesn’t lessen the hilarity of them.
After their son’s graduation from college in New York City, they have an alcohol-fuelled, nostalgic dinner together which results in them beginning an affair, which continues in Santa Barbara. Jane feels both guilty and proud about the affair while Jake is just ecstatic that they’re together again and that everything happened for a reason.
They hide their affair from their adult children but Harley (John Krasinski), who is engaged to their daughter Lauren, spots the pair in a hotel, but keeps silent because he just doesn’t know what to do.
However, if things weren’t complicated enough, Jane starts (sort of) seeing her architect who is remodelling her kitchen, Adam (Steve Martin) who was also cheated on and went through a messy divorce. Full of likeable characters, witty banter, physical humour and frothy romantic affection, this film is perfect for its target demographic and for those who prefer to watch a light and funny take on divorce.
18. The Parent Trap (1998)
The second adaptation of Erich Kästner’s German novel “Lottie and Lisa” (Das doppelte Lottchen) following the 1961 film of same name, Nancy Meyer’s film modernises this gimmicky tale with fresh talent, lots of cultural references and heart.
Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson star as a couple who divorce soon after passionately marrying and becoming pregnant with twins. Although the reason behind their divorce is never expanded much further than “we couldn’t stand each other”, they seem to hate each other so much that they split up their identical twins as soon as they were born and raised them in separate continents, just so they would never need to meet each other again.
A bit harsh and unethical, raising their children without telling them that they have an identical twin with their abandoned mother slash father who they can never meet. But the unethical premise is easily smoothed over by the goofy and accidental reunion of the eleven-year-old redheaded twins Hallie Parker and Annie James (both played by Lindsay Lohan) at a summer camp in Maine.
Although initially confused and hostile towards each other, the girls figure out the truth and set out to meet their previously unknown parents. Each girl trains the other to impersonate her, with the intent to switch places at the end of summer camp. All-American Hallie learns to mimic her sister’s high class British accent while Annie has to cut her hair and get her ears pierced, credit to her sister and a needle. They conspire to bring their parents back together so that they will never be apart again.
19. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
This Wes Anderson comedy-drama opens with Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) telling his three prodigy children, Chas, Margot and Richie, that he and his wife Ethaline (Angelica Huston) are separating. They ask if he still loves them and if he still loves their mother, and he does. So they ask him why she asked him to leave, and he’s left dumbfounded.
Although they were never legally divorced, Royal was never really there during their adolescent years, unless he needed money from Chas’s business venture (which he stole from, was prosecuted for and ended up being disbarred, and in jail for a while), which is assumed to be one of the main reasons why the children experienced significant failure and disaster after their successful childhoods.
Twenty-two years later, all of the Tenenbaum children are depressed and Royal has been kicked out of the hotel he has been living in for that amount of time. He tries to re-enter all of their lives for a number of reasons including his newfound homelessness, but primarily because Ethaline has just been proposed to by her long-time accountant, Henry Sherman (Donald Glover).
Royal claims that he has stomach cancer in order to win back his old life and move back into their family home. Soon Chas (Ben Stiller), his children, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and eventually Richie (Luke Wilson) move back in due to each suffering from a nervous breakdown.
Along with his frequent co-writer (and also cast member) Owen Wilson, the two were nominated for an Academy Award for their Original Screenplay, which is a depressingly funny and deeply ironic sad film.
20. The First Wives Club (1996)
Based on the best-selling 1992 novel of the same name by Olivia Goldsmith, the film centres around three newly divorced women who seek revenge – scratch that – “justice” from their ex-husbands who all left them for younger women after the fourth member of their once-close girlfriend college group killed herself when her husband married his much younger mistress.
The three women reconnect at their late friend’s (Stockard Channing) funeral after years of ignoring or putting off meeting each other since their college graduation. There’s Elise Elliot (Goldie Hawn), an alcoholic and plastic surgery addicted movie actress whose husband (Victor Garber) also left her for a younger woman (Elizabeth Berkley).
Then there’s the divorced, depressed Brenda Morelli (Bette Midler) whose ex-husband Morty (Dan Hedaya) is now dating the stereotypical blonde (Sarah Jessica Partner) while trying to raise her feminist, lesbian daughter.
Finally there’s the narrating Annie MacDuggan (Diane Keaton) who is only separated from husband (Stephen Collins) while they see a therapist (Marcia Gay Harden) whom her husband leaves her for. Together they make up the “First Wives Club” whose aim is to make their husbands pay both financially and emotionally for what they did to them.
While cheesy and misandric, the film is a light hearted slapstick comedy highlighted by a perfectly cast ensemble who know how to balance heartfelt moments with self-depreciating humour and hard-core retaliation.
Author Bio: Susannah Farrugia is an undergraduate Psychology student at the University Of Malta. Her life is measured in films and television shows. She enjoys drawing scenes and designing posters based on the films she has seen.