BEFORE: OK, so it seems I still have a few movie-related demons to exorcise - I've avoided this movie for many years, mostly because my first wife went to see it without me, back in 1995. I don't remember who she went to see it with, but it could have been with the woman that she left me for, I don't recall. All I remember (and admittedly, not very clearly) is that not long after, she came out as gay, and that was pretty much the end of our marriage, barring paperwork and the splitting of personal items and cats. But can I really blame the movie for that? Probably not, not any more than I can blame her Queen and Melissa Etheridge albums, or anything else that helped her realize who she was or needed to become. A movie or album can't turn anybody gay, however I still might hold some belief that portrayals of certain relationships in movies and TV shows can influence people to some degree - however, I still think I might have held this movie responsible for things which are not its fault.
Jeez, it's funny how I can categorize a movie with some contempt, but then this can change after I determine that I need it to help my chain keep going, that's all. I haven't caved very often, but I have surrendered once in a while. Whatever happens tonight, can we chalk it up to personal growth? Jeremy Northam AND Janet McTeer carry over from "Wuthering Heights".
THE PLOT: The platonic relationship between artist Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey in the early twentieth century.
AFTER: Eh, it's still not really my kind of movie, perhaps because the subject matter hits too close to home, and it will always remind me of the past and what could have been. The road not taken, I suppose, involved me staying in a marriage that had become extremely problematic, and I could only see a future where my wife would be exploring her newfound sexual identity and I wouldn't be involved in that process, or allowed to go on any journey of my own, and that hardly seemed fair. Years later, I stumbled on an interview in a running magazine where my ex discussed her inspiration for running marathons, and it touched upon the fact that her husband had "thrown her out", which of course is not how I remember it. Look, breakups are painful, often for both parties, and in the confusion of the situation I strongly advised that she move out, but I would never look back on that as "throwing her out", I just didn't see how we could have a future together, so then there was no point in continuing - and once you realize that, you kind of want to clear the deck as soon as possible, so that everyone involved can get on with their lives and start looking for the next relationship. Eventually, of course, because these things take time.
That's the story that I tell myself, at least, in order to maintain my sanity - now I don't know if it's true, maybe from another perspective I "threw her out", but again, it was a confusing time and once I resolved that things had to change, I set about changing them. But none of that matters now, and none of that helps me understand the situation portrayed in "Carrington", which is about ten times more confusing than my first marriage ever was. We tend to think of our very modern times as extremely confusing where things like gender and sexual orientation are concerned, but the truth is that you mixed-up non-binary teens these days don't know how good you have it. You've grown up in a new society (America, at least) where gay marriage is legal in all 50 states (umm, for now, if you're in a red state) and I do support that, but you have to keep in mind that within the average lifetime, that wasn't always the case. I remember a few years there where gay people could only get married in a few states, and the laws were new and were occasionally overturned, so what happened if a gay couple got married in one state where that was legal and then moved to another state, where it wasn't? Exactly. Or what if a state had a law making gay marriage legal, and then that law got overturned?
We've witnessed great change within just a few decades - but with gay marriage also came gay divorce, because you just can't have one without the other. Just remember, people fought for that and won, but is that really a victory? Again, I support gay rights, but you have to take the bad with the good, and we're going to go through something similar with trans rights, there are legal issues coming, perhaps, that nobody has even foreseen yet. Remember the fuss over transgender bathrooms and trans teens playing sports? That's just the tip of the iceberg, I think. But that's not what I wanted to talk about either, my point is that things used to be much, much tougher for gay people back in the early 1900's, where it was slowly becoming a time of greater acceptance, but also one of great challenges - and I'm thinking it was also a very, very confusing time for a lot of people, just because these topics weren't discussed openly, in polite society. England, being a very polite society as a whole, was probably the hardest hit by this. The main character here doesn't even know what a gay man really is, she's heard them called "buggers" but isn't quite sure what that means.
When we first see Carrington, she's an aspiring artist with a boyfriend, Mark, only she's still a virgin and she's been fighting off Mark's advances for a long time, which has only made him more frustrated because he can't get what he wants. This is something of a self-perpetuating problem, the longer he goes without sex, the more frustrated he gets, so he takes it out on her, which only drives them further apart, and so on. Dude, that's just not going to work, not in the early 20th century. True, women were still considered man's property back then, but go figure, they were starting to develop minds of their own, it seems. And what they wanted was to be free and not have men telling them what to do. And voting, they wanted that too.
Some girls also wanted to be boys, or to be as important as boys, remember it was still a patriarchal society and men always had the inside track when it came to succeeding at business and government and stuff. Carrington sort of wished she were a man, and author Lytton Strachey also wished she were a man, in fact he was at first attracted to her because he thought she was a teenage boy. Well, I guess you can't always get what you want, not back then, anyway. Carrington and Strachey start enjoying each other's company, and Mark supports this relationship because he thinks it will calm her down, and then he can have sex with her - but he certainly didn't expect her to fall in love with Strachey, a gay man. Eventually there's talk of Carrington and Strachey moving in together, because they enjoy each other's company, only not sexually. Except, of course, for the times when they did have sex.
Yes, this is all quite confusing. But is it any more confusing than finding out that Freddie Mercury, for example, had a long-term girlfriend, despite identifying as a gay man? What about the fact that Elton John was briefly married, yes, to a woman? Though the film "Rocketman" really skipped over the details of the honeymoon, I think we can determine that things just didn't quite work out. Then we get to icons like Lou Reed and David Bowie, who also messed around with sexual identity - I want to avoid being vulgar here, because all of these people are entitled to have private lives, despite being celebrities. No, but seriously, how did it work for Bowie, being a "closeted heterosexual"?
I'm getting off track, but in the modern sexual confusion of the 1970's we can sort of extrapolate backwards, society didn't get there overnight, decades before that, there were English people like Strachey and Carrington, who sometimes followed their heart and sometimes followed, well, their naughty bits, and then sometimes there was a disconnect between who they felt love for and who they had sex with. Those two things can be different, it's OK, it's been going on for years, and again, it's only in the past few decades that people have become comfortable talking about it.
Anyway, Carrington's relationship with Strachey, whatever it was, really screwed up her chances with Mark, who couldn't understand why his girlfriend chose a gay man over him. I don't know, maybe it was all the yelling Mark did? The fact that he turned everything into a competition that he had to win? His attempts to force Carrington to love him and choose him, forsaking all others? You can't MAKE somebody love you, and you just shouldn't get frustrated that you can't do that, at some point you've got to wisen up and realize that's just not the way it works. Love is given freely, not forced, or it just doesn't count.
Then things get even more confusing when Carrington brings home a new man, Ralph ("Rafe") Partridge, a big hunky World War I veteran who seemed to despise homosexuals, but possibly maybe was one himself? This of course, is a bit unclear, but there's a lot here that's unclear - Strachey takes a shine to Ralph, but does Ralph even swing that way? Seems like he does, but if he does, he kind of hates himself for it? Did Carrington bring Ralph home for herself, or for Lytton? I guess Carrington and Ralph got married, but then they both had other partners after that? Geez, this is more confusing than the extramarital sexual life of Iris Murdoch, what is UP with the post-war British people?
Carrington buys a big, drafty Mill House (it's practically "wuthering") and starts living there with Lytton Strachey, but eventually Ralph moves in, too, and it's a very weird sort of love triangle, which eventually becomes a quadrangle after Ralph's friend and fellow veteran Gerald Brenan comes to visit, and he falls in love with Carrington, too. Nobody in this film is happy, it seems, unless they've got a steady relationship going on, plus a bit on the side as well. Are all Brits this horny? I had no idea - or is it just this lot? Ralph takes on another partner, Lytton takes on another partner, Carrington takes on another partner, and so on. That big house gets pretty crowded after a while, and I don't know how they kept all the relationships straight. There was so much bed-hopping and partner-swapping going on that I think one time, two people accidentally slept together and then remembered they were married, to each other! What a confusing night THAT was!
The problem is, it didn't seem to make any of these people flat-out happy, why do you suppose that is? After all was said and done, it seems like they couldn't overcome petty jealousies, as if none of them were really as forward-thinking as they thought they were. It's only natural for people in relationships to become possessive, the thinking is that they enjoy this person's company, that makes them feel good, and then they want to KEEP ON feeling good like that, again and again, but of course, everything is temporary. Or maybe everybody just eventually gets bored and wants to move on to the next thing - but moving on to the next thing can be painful, as we all know. So how, then, to have love, keep love and not feel pain? Yeah, it turns out that's impossible. There will always be pain, things will always continue to end, and the best you can hope for is just to minimize the bad feelings and the down time, or at least learn to make peace with them.
I had a conversation along these lines with a female co-worker today, where I said exactly that, more or less. Of course these days you can't really have intense dramatic conversations about relationships with co-workers, we all took a sexual harassment training course to remind us that most talk about topics like this is not suitable workplace conversation, you just can't be too careful about this. But the gist of it is that she's 30 years old, and I'm 53 with a bit more relationship experience - and she wants to make sure that the next relationship she has is the one that lasts, only you can never really know that for sure, there are no guarantees in life. To give her advice, I had to reveal that when I got married at 23, and at 25 I thought I had everything figured out, only I was wrong, and everything fell apart when I was 27. That's just how it goes, over the course of your life there could be several times when everything turns to crap and you essentially have to start over. Yes, I rebuilt my life, but with a divorce in my past, that fear is constant, it never goes away, there's always the feeling that the relationship I have now could also dissolve, and the best I can do is work every day to prevent that from happening.
I'm not really sure any of this personal stuff relates directly to "Carrington", but maybe some of it does. The past relationships the characters had certainly may have colored the present ones, we all travel around this crazy world and we bounce into others and all of our interactions change us as we move forward. That's the plan, anyway, and I hope we all are growing stronger and smarter as we go, or that the pain, when it comes, doesn't stick around for too long. And we can try to be friends with our lovers, and our lovers' lovers, but at times that all can become very difficult indeed, I suppose that's the take-away here.
Also starring Emma Thompson (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Steven Waddington (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Rufus Sewell (last seen in "Judy"), Samuel West (last seen in "Iris"), Penelope Wilton (ditto), Peter Blythe (last seen in "Frankenstein Created Woman"), Alex Kingston (last seen in "Like Crazy"), Sebastian Harcombe, Richard Clifford (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), David Ryall (last seen in "City of Ember"), Stephen Boxer, Annabel Mullion, Gary Turner, Georgiana Dacombe, Neville Phillips (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Christopher Birch.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Welsh frumps
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