Set your Tivos - Married in America - MAY 23 - 5/15/07

[Smartmarriages]

- MARRIED IN AMERICA - PART II

Part II of "Married in America" will air next Wed night May 23rd on Hallmark
Channel from 9pm - midnight.

I haven't yet found an advance review, so I'll resend the NY Times article
about the introduction of the series 5 years ago.

Apted is taking on marriage using the same documentary format he used in his
classic and highly acclaimed "7 Up" series. In "7 Up" he interviewed 7 year
olds and revisited them every 7 years. It made for unexpected and
fascinating insights that illustrate the importance of family and class
systems.  

In 2002, for Married in America he interviewed nine couples as they prepared
to marry. Next Wed will be our first update on their "progress".

Send me your own reviews or any you see.  Thanks.

- diane 
--------------------------------
New York Times 
Marriage Under Glass: A 10-Year Look Begins
June 16, 2002
By STEVE VINEBERG 

THE 10-year lease A&E has taken on Michael Apted's new
documentary series, "Married in America," is built into its
concept. Mr. Apted interviewed nine couples last fall, in
the months leading up to their weddings, for a two-hour
film that has its premiere tomorrow night. He will revisit
them every year or two during the next 10 to observe how
their lives together have changed.

Though the idea of exploring family interactions over time
was pioneered in 1973 on "An American Family," the
decade-long span of "Married in America" makes it almost
unique among television documentaries. But this kind of
project isn't unfamiliar to Mr. Apted, as fans of his "7
Up" movies know. 

"7 Up," produced for the British news program "The World in
Action" in 1964, chronicled the thoughts and feelings of a
group of 7-year-old Londoners across a range of classes.
Mr. Apted, straight out of college and a trainee at Granada
Television, was put to work locating likely subjects. "7
Up" was originally planned as a one-shot deal, but it
blossomed into a remarkable open-ended series that returned
to the lives of these boys and girls every seven years, and
with "14 Up," Mr. Apted took over the roles of interviewer
and director. (The project is continuing; he is set to film
the seventh installment, "49 Up," in 2005.)

The only previous example of this kind of journalism on
American television is Phil Joanou's adaptation of the "7
Up" series, "7 Up in America," which Mr. Apted produced for
Showtime and which has so far produced two documentaries,
in 1991 and 1998. 

Mr. Apted's filmography is as unorthodox as the
time-capsule documentaries he invented. It's not unknown
for a documentarian to dabble in fiction film (Frederick
Wiseman has), or for a commercial filmmaker to make the
occasional documentary (Louis Malle directed several
brilliant ones). But Mr. Apted's career is truly divided
between the two. The "7 Up" pictures and other nonfiction
projects like "Moving the Mountain" (about the Tiananmen
Square demonstrations) and "Me & Isaac Newton" alternate
with movies like "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Gorillas in the
Mist" and the James Bond thriller "The World Is Not
Enough." In 1992 he released a documentary, "Incident at
Oglala," and a commercial feature, "Thunderheart," on the
same subject, the 1975 shoot-out between Native Americans
and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge reservation in South
Dakota. 

"Married in America" comes at a particularly prolific
moment for the 61-year-old Mr. Apted: two dramas he
directed, the World War II tale "Enigma" with Kate Winslet
and the thriller "Enough" with Jennifer Lopez, opened in
this country in the last two months, and he's about to
begin work on a film about the Rolling Stones' coming
40th-anniversary tour.

"I work this way for a multitude of reasons," he said by
phone from Los Angeles, where he now makes his home. "I
enjoy the different challenges that both kinds of movies
offer, and documentary allows me to get out of Hollywood
and nose around into people's lives. And in an
opportunistic way, the documentaries give me a calling
card. A lot of the commercial movies I've gotten came about
because they called for a documentary feeling."

And if his documentary work has sometimes influenced the
naturalistic style of his Hollywood movies - most
evidently, perhaps, in the tenderly shaped mining-town
sequences of "Coal Miner's Daughter" - he believes that it
works the other way, too. "What I learn from dramatic
movies is structure, the putting together of characters,"
he says. 

Character is always Mr. Apted's main concern as a
moviemaker. The narrative mechanisms of his dramatic films
often lack conviction; it's the human element that makes
some of them memorable. Look down a list of his movies, and
it's easy to conjure up the faces of Vanessa Redgrave and
Dustin Hoffman in "Agatha," Sigourney Weaver in "Gorillas
in the Mist," Kate Winslet in "Enigma" and many others.

In the hot-house intimacies of reality television, the
subjects, usually thrown together in an entirely
manufactured situation, tend to mouth all the banalities
they've picked up from their own television watching. But
the people in "Married in America," like those in the "7
Up" series, are as continually surprising as true dramatic
creations. 

"The subject matter of my documentaries has to do with
ordinary life rather than melodrama," Mr. Apted said. "I
want the ordinariness of these people to make them
accessible, and yet there's drama in their lives - the
drama of getting through the day."

Certainly his selection of the nine couples, from hundreds
that were interviewed, suggests an instinct for the drama
in everyday existence. Three are racially mixed. One young
man is marrying the first woman he has been involved with
since the mother of his two children died in a car
accident. One couple is lesbian. One pair returns from
their honeymoon in mid-September to a bizarre contrast: an
apartment full of wedding gifts and a view of ground zero,
two blocks away. 

The match that viewers are likely to find most affecting is
between Carol and Chuck, two refugees from several
disastrous marriages apiece who met at an Alcoholics
Anonymous meeting after Chuck had served time for rape. The
most hard-bitten of Mr. Apted's subjects, Carol and Chuck
(last names are not used in the show, to protect the
couples' privacy) are also the most down to earth, and
their struggle to clear away the debris of their respective
pasts so that they can start fresh makes us optimistic for
them. It's the most powerful metaphor in the film for the
tension in any relationship between the odds against
success and the hope that it can beat those odds.

"What drew me to the topic was the politics of marriage,"
Mr. Apted said. "During election time especially you hear
all this emphasis on family values - how America is built
on them, how important they are - and on the other hand
you're presented with terrifying divorce rates. But I tried
to choose couples I thought at least had a shot at
marriage. I saw some tapes of couples whose relationships
looked like train wrecks about to happen, and if I included
couples who seemed airheaded about the whole thing, that
wouldn't help my project."

Choosing the couples was a tricky process in other ways as
well. "I didn't want to ask them questions that were
directly on the subject of marriage," he said. "I've
learned from my mistakes that subjects can sound great the
first time out, and then when you come to film them, they
lose that freshness and energy. I needed to know enough
about their story without hearing what they'd say for the
first and only time on film. It was a bit of a gamble."

Chuck and Carol and the lesbians, Kelly and Toni, are the
couples Mr. Apted himself found the most touching - "people
who seem to have the most at stake, who are under the most
pressure, up against it, on the margins of society."

"But though they may be the most moving now," he added,
"I've learned from the `Up' films to watch out for which
people have the most movement in their lives. People don't
move too much on the margins of society, where they don't
have as much room; it's the middle-ground couples who have
the biggest journey to make. But I'm trying not to make
generalizations. For example, I noticed that the women I
interviewed were making most of the decisions, which fitted
into my preconception that America is a matriarchal
society. But then I thought I'd better be careful - this is
the wedding phase, when women are in charge. This is their
moment." 

Mr. Apted's resolve to stay open to surprise is a large
part of what makes him a superlative documentary filmmaker.
The "7 Up" series, which began as an examination of class,
underwent a dramatic shift in direction in "35 Up" when a
couple of the upper-class subjects elected to drop out of
the study. The distance between those who remained and the
middle- and working-class subjects was suddenly telescoped
by common concerns: aging parents, children growing into
adulthood, the difficulties of maintaining marriages. In
the case of "Married in America," the focus will remain
constant, but the issues are sure to alter as these couples
stride into an unknown future.


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