To Joy (1950)

Not rated, but this is a movie that, while not being completely explicit with some of these things, deals with some absolute misery.  This movie deals with alcoholism, abortion, infidelity, potential murder, and domestic abuse.  Also, it doesn't really condemn the spousal abuse as much as it should.  It's one of those "forgivable offenses" in this movie.  Considering that this is a love story, it's pretty much a bummer all the way through.  Again, not explicit in a lot of cases.  But they talk about it and the physical abuse doesn't show the victim through the beating.  It's still rough though.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

The War of the Hobbies against Time rages on.  The baby is asleep for a nap while my wife texts me with questions.  I know if I don't write this blog right now, I won't be able to get to it until late Sunday night.  I have sixty plus pages to read in my book today and I'd love to do a million other things.  The house is also a mess, despite the fact that my daughter swore that she wouldn't make a mess if I allowed her to make cookies.  I have about an hour to all of these things.  Admittedly, I lead a blessed life.

...unlike these folks.  (The one thing I'm great at?  Transitions!) I'm pretty sure that I've seen this movie.  Not only had I seen it, but I'm pretty sure that I put it on my recommendations shelf one week when I worked at the video store.  I think I just wanted to come across as hoity toity by putting a lesser known Berman film on my recommendations shelf for the week.  But when I put it on my shelf, I was a sad single man who liked bleak things.  I had no idea what marriage was all about.  It was all videos and hobbies all the time.  (Oh man, the sheer amount of hobbies I would have destroyed in this time was admirable!) This is a movie about marriage for married people.  Bergman probably gets as close as he does to a morality play with To Joy, although now I really have to question Ingmar Berman's morals.  Bergman has always been pretty upsetting when it comes to relationships, romantic or otherwise.  His movies tend to show awful people being awful to each other and it's always just a bit too depressing for me.  To Joy might be the biggest bummer from me (from the oversized Criterion set) so far because To Joy tonally might be his most romantic film.  

Just to give you context for how bleak this movie gets, the film starts off with one of the protagonists being informed that his wife blew up and that his little girl is badly burned.  You'd think that the rest of the film would be a flashback explaining how they had a perfect marriage.  No, they had a trash marriage.  For some reason, we get this absolute Mary Sue of a character with Marta, a character who is the ideal wife.  She is cooler than Stig, her husband, and never cheats on him.  (Do you see where I'm going with this?  Stig cheats on his wife. There.  I cleared things up.)  And then we have Stig, who sucks from moment one.  Now, part of the story is that Stig's journey kind of parallels Scrooge.  He's a jerk and she's going to make him a better man.  This is where Bergman kind of gets me angry.

Stig may be one of the most unlikable men ever.  We're meant to dislike Scrooge when we meet him, but the journey both softens him and gives us context for his behavior.  Just to throw myself under the bus a little, Stig and I share a very specific trait.  I'd like to think that I temper this attitude more than Stig does, but I'm not distant enough from myself to firmly make this claim.  This could be why I get so angry at Stig now.  Stig has that fear of mediocrity.  He's an artist who always imagined that he would have free reign to pursue artistic excellence and that he would receive affirmation for this impressive accomplishments.  In of itself, that's not too toxic.  It's just that he views any kind of obstacle to his rise to success as something to be quashed.  Honestly, that kind of makes Marta the antagonist of the story.  Marta throughout the film is completely sympathetic.  She's an antagonist in the sense that she is in the way from Stig's obsession with artistic freedom.  But she's the hero of the piece, without a doubt.  Stig is the monster.

Again, I do hate Stig way more than Scrooge.  The reason why I hate Stig is that Stig, while being a character who makes a dynamic character change in the final act, isn't a character who makes a choice so much as he hits rock bottom.  There's no one else to hurt, so thus he comes to the realization that he has to be a better husband.  That's not romantic.  If anything, that's kind of pathetic.  I talked about this in the content section, but he straight up beats his wife because she commented on his poorly hidden affair.  She wasn't even yelling. 

And this is where Bergman kind of loses me with this movie.  He beats his wife and it's meant to be a low point in their relationship.  Bergman's message in this movie is that marriages can be rough, but we should cherish every moment because it could be gone just like that.  But Marta absolutely should not stay with Stig.  I don't care that she has two kids.  We would have forgiven her if she left after Stig left to have an affair with a terrible human being.  But he straight up beats her.  Again, this moment is supposed to be a character low, but Stig learns the wrong lesson from this.  This might be a dated and cultural thing, but I'm not letting it off the hook.  There's a part in the climax, when the two decide to fix their marriage, that Stig is thinking of all the mistakes that he made that led them to this moment.  He says that he finds the beating to be something that needed to happen to make him love her all the more.  I'm wording it poorly, but not as poorly as you think.  That's pretty gross. I don't care for that at all.

There's a story in here that I really like.  I like the idea that To Joy shows the concept of marriage, warts and all.  I like the idea for, all the growth that happens within a marriage, it is because of growing pains and obstinancy.  But this movie gets to be too much.  Bergman's attempt was to show how low a marriage could get before being redeemed.  But it, by accident, almost excuses the behavior that the characters go through because it shows that anything can be forgiven.  I can imagine the same amount of frustration without any of the abuse or infidelity.  Most fights that my wife and I have are about dumb stuff.  Things that I hold close to me tend to be death by a thousand papercuts kind of things, not massive drag-out-beat-up things like To Joy is showing.  That's the message I want to see.  I want to see the story of how much better love is than the moments of sadness that hit all of the time.  It's the knowledge that, as low as a daily grind can get, moments of joy overshadow all of that stuff.  Instead, we get Stig the Monster who absolutely needs to be in prison and alone.

Then the movie ends with the knowledge that Marta --sweet and kind Marta! --is going to die from a kerosene stove exploding?  Also, good for Stig for going back to work to be this strong man for his kids.  But remember how one of the kids is badly burned and almost died? Maybe that kid should get a little bit of attention.  To throw this blog into the gender studies camp, it's also odd that it was the girl who was horribly burned by the kerosene stove.  The low hanging fruit is something that Bergman straight up put in his dialogue, that the woman enjoys cooking for a husband.  But the bigger question is what Bergman might be subconsciously saying about the role of men in society.  These two come out of this tragedy with an emotional burden that can be lived with.  But we don't even care about how the female character has been horribly disfigured and witnessed the death of her mother?  It's an afterthought because the male child watched his father play well.  I don't know how good of a message that really is.

My reptile brain does like the movie overall for multiple reasons.  Besides being well-paced with some great interactions and slices of life, I think I like movies about musicians.  It's another movie about artists and there's something incredibly satisfying to see creative obsession.  Also, the fact that they are classical musicians means that the moovie is scored with epic classical music.  It works really well for me.  There are moments that remind me of Whiplash.  Am I supposed to hear how terribly they are playing or is that part of the whole bit, that the director will never be happy with perfection?  I don't know.  All I know is that aesthetically it is cool.

I kind of wonder what I saw in this besides outright cynicism, despite being a romantic drama.  It's watchable, for sure.  But it also has some really weird messaging going on.