英文影评：《当男人爱上女人》
发布时间：2024-06-30 12:24:39
The feel-bad movie of the summer, "When a Man Loves a Woman" opens with a seductively funny scene: Eating lunch at a San Francisco yuppie saloon, Meg Ryan is trying to read while deflecting inept passes from suits at the bar. Suddenly, as if from a romance novel, darkly handsome Andy Garcia glides in in a pilot's uniform, and with a few smooth words, piques her interest. In minutes, Ryan is on his lap on the barstool, to the slack-jawed disbelief of the last joker who tried to start up a conversation with her.
They're married, you see, and that's the kind of spontaneous fun their relationship seems built on. As Alice and Michael Green, Ryan and Garcia play a hip, happy, beautiful young couple in a perfect, still-passionate marriage with two sweet daughters and a J. Crew catalogue lifestyle.
But this sunny early scene and others are setting us英文影评 up for a dark and painful fall. Ryan's alcoholism is the ill-kept secret of this emotionally harrowing and tear-wrenching drama of domestic crisis, a sort of suburban "Scared Straight."
When Ryan comes home late one night without calling, leaving the children unattended, Garcia swiftly smooths the incident over (can you say "enabler"?); later, when they vacation in Cancun, tipsy Ryan literally goes overboard. Contrite and facile, she says all the right things. "I promise you . . . I promise me."
Then it really starts to get ugly.
Guzzling vodka from a soon-to-be empty bottle, Ryan locks herself out of the house in her nightgown one night. Shortly afterward, she staggers home from work, sloppy and nasty, strikes her frightened oldest daughter and caps the ugly scene with a truly shattering blackout.
"When a Man Loves a Woman" doesn't dwell on the rehab process, as did the similarly themed (and equally hard to endure) "Clean and Sober," although we do see Ryan sweating and suffering in detox, sharing tentatively in meetings and staying in touch with fellow recoverers.
The script was written by Ronald Bass and Al Franken, who plays twelve-step maven Stuart Smalley on "Saturday Night Live" and is seriously conversant with the realities of recovery. So when Ryan emerges, she may be clean and sober, but she's hardly ready for happily-ever-after. The film's second half is perhaps more emotionally taxing than the first, detailing the impact of truth and recovery on the marriage. This is one love story that begins where the beautiful couple comes apart.
It's hard to imagine anyone but the utterly winning Garcia and Ryan making this sobering material so bearable, and so watchable in spite of itself. Ryan shows an edge she's not revealed before, and Garcia makes you ache with him as his solidity dissolves.
But it's the movingly natural performances by children Tina Majorino and Mae Whitman that hold the movie's true center. They know something is wrong all along -- you can see it in their wary, preternaturally grave eyes, their pained and bewildered little faces. Old and experienced way before their time, theirs is the real tragedy of this film.
They're married, you see, and that's the kind of spontaneous fun their relationship seems built on. As Alice and Michael Green, Ryan and Garcia play a hip, happy, beautiful young couple in a perfect, still-passionate marriage with two sweet daughters and a J. Crew catalogue lifestyle.
But this sunny early scene and others are setting us英文影评 up for a dark and painful fall. Ryan's alcoholism is the ill-kept secret of this emotionally harrowing and tear-wrenching drama of domestic crisis, a sort of suburban "Scared Straight."
When Ryan comes home late one night without calling, leaving the children unattended, Garcia swiftly smooths the incident over (can you say "enabler"?); later, when they vacation in Cancun, tipsy Ryan literally goes overboard. Contrite and facile, she says all the right things. "I promise you . . . I promise me."
Then it really starts to get ugly.
Guzzling vodka from a soon-to-be empty bottle, Ryan locks herself out of the house in her nightgown one night. Shortly afterward, she staggers home from work, sloppy and nasty, strikes her frightened oldest daughter and caps the ugly scene with a truly shattering blackout.
"When a Man Loves a Woman" doesn't dwell on the rehab process, as did the similarly themed (and equally hard to endure) "Clean and Sober," although we do see Ryan sweating and suffering in detox, sharing tentatively in meetings and staying in touch with fellow recoverers.
The script was written by Ronald Bass and Al Franken, who plays twelve-step maven Stuart Smalley on "Saturday Night Live" and is seriously conversant with the realities of recovery. So when Ryan emerges, she may be clean and sober, but she's hardly ready for happily-ever-after. The film's second half is perhaps more emotionally taxing than the first, detailing the impact of truth and recovery on the marriage. This is one love story that begins where the beautiful couple comes apart.
It's hard to imagine anyone but the utterly winning Garcia and Ryan making this sobering material so bearable, and so watchable in spite of itself. Ryan shows an edge she's not revealed before, and Garcia makes you ache with him as his solidity dissolves.
But it's the movingly natural performances by children Tina Majorino and Mae Whitman that hold the movie's true center. They know something is wrong all along -- you can see it in their wary, preternaturally grave eyes, their pained and bewildered little faces. Old and experienced way before their time, theirs is the real tragedy of this film.