Thursday Movie Picks Meme: Married Couples

This week, the theme for Wanderer's Thursday Movie Picks Meme is Married Couples. That's simple enough. I've got to find three movies that each feature a married couple of some sort. There's plenty of those. Finding a movie that involves a married couple isn't too hard. The real challenge is finding something a bit more unusual. There are plenty of films that deal with the mundane nature of relationships or difficulties that may emerge, so I have decided for this list to find three more unusual interpretations of marriage.

The obvious choice for me is Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but I am refraining from using that one as I have done it for a previous entry into the Thursday Movie Picks Meme. Instead, I have decided to find three other less obvious choices for movies about married life that take it in some unusual directions. For each one, I have also attempted to include a picture of the couple in question.

Naked Lunch (1991)

Ordinary marriage can be frustrating enough, how could it possibly get any worse? Well, for one thing the husband and wife could both get addicted to powder designed for killing bugs and blackmeat from aquatic centipedes. Factor in some crazy hallucinations that culminate in the husband accidentally shooting the wife and then encountering a similar-looking woman who may or may not be a product of his imagination, and you have a mess on your hands. This is a bit of a weird one because exactly how the relationship between the married couple plays into the story is not entirely clear.

Solaris (2002)

The Tarkovsky version is too slow. There, I've got that out of the way. Now we can talk about a weird one. This is a bit of an odd example in that even though it centers around a relationship between a married couple, one of them is already dead when the movie begins. It's a complicated situation, one that even Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) does not fully understand (indeed, the uncertainty about what is happening is the driving force of the whole film). What matters is that he made a mistake that led to his wife committing suicide, and now he has a chance to make amends. What would you do if that happened?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)

Marriage can be dull and tedious, but there are ways it can also get exciting. For instance, discovering that your significant other is in fact a trained assassin just like you. That's precisely what happens in this odd blend of the action film and the romantic comedy, where boy meets girl and stuff blows up. Of course what really makes this movie interesting is it's hard to tell where the action movie elements end and the romantic comedy sections begin. In other words, the action scenes feel more romantic and the romantic moments feel more like action scenes.... and that's when they're not having a romantic moment during an action scene (or vice versa).