Enough Said, a film by Nicole Holofcener

Enough Said, a 2013 film starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini, offers an adults-eye view of misunderstandings, secrets, and how we muddle through after sabotaging our best prospects. Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a masseuse, 10 years post-divorce, with her daughter about to leave for college on the opposite coast. Gandolfini is Albert, a divorced dad in a similar situation; they meet at a party, and cautiously begin seeing each other. Both have been burned – they’re not looking for commitment, but they’re about to be home solo, which they’re dreading. 

Eva’s new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), is a poet, also divorced, with a college-bound daughter. Eva’s clients talk while she’s massaging them, and Marianne, facing loneliness with her daughter’s imminent departure, cultivates her as a friend and confidante. At some point Eva realizes Marianne is Albert’s ex – it’s so awkward she can’t bring herself to say anything – and yet, as she hears more from Marianne, Eva begins to needle him about the same issues that made Marianne divorce him. 

This is a Holofcener film, in which ugly secrets spill and the characters have to clean up their mess, in a humiliatingly-public way. She also highlights male vs female communication styles and expectations: one of Eva’s clients is a young man whose apartment is up a steep flight of stairs. He stands at his door watching her haul her massage table up, week after week. When she complains at dinner with friends, the woman agrees he should offer to help her. The husband says, “Have you asked?” and Eva and his wife both say she shouldn’t have to. This married couple, Toni Collette and Ben Falcone, have the same level of annoyance with each other’s foibles as Eva and her ex, and Albert and Marianne. It’s fair to ask why they’re still together while their friends are not – do they just have thicker skins? 

Should we be so ready to bail when we arrive at those “I can’t take it any more” moments? You are surely your own perfect roommate, and everyone else falls short – too neat, too sloppy, too driven, too laid-back – but if the price of not tolerating these differences is to live alone, do we really want that, for ourselves or for society? After Covid isolation, it’s become clear how many social skills we’ve lost – how to compromise, how to listen, how to empathize, how to have patience. How to be good partners, friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens. 

Holofcener shows situations where we have to work through these issues, even when it feels easier to just walk away. It’s hard to connect in deep and honest ways – should we be blowing off relationships because we’ve embarrassed ourselves or those we’re getting to know? Can we be forgiving, cut each other some slack, and set aside judgment? As Rodney King famously pleaded, after receiving a “wood shampoo” from 34 cops, “Can’t we all just get along?”

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

Barely over a year into their marriage, Celestial and Roy, a rising Atlanta couple, visit his parents in rural Louisiana. Knowing his mother’s discomfort with his choice of a city girl, independent and artistic and ambitious, he opts to lodge with Celestial at a motel not the house. Which proves fateful: he is accused of raping another guest, and we watch the well-greased skids as an African American man is in quick succession accused, tried, convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated, with little concern for due process, legal subtleties, or opportunity to assert his innocence.

This novel is told in first person, in the voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre, Celestial’s childhood friend and confidante, who introduced her and Roy.

Through an exchange of letters we watch the couple’s relationship devolve. Celestial’s prosperous family gladly foots the bill for appeals, but her visits dwindle as her business, hand-sewing fabric doll-babies, takes off. Roy supported her dream before his own was derailed, but the incongruity between her life and his becomes an intolerable burden. Celestial writes:

“At your mother’s funeral, your father showed what the connection is between husband and wife. If he could have, he would have gone into the grave instead of her. But they lived under one roof for more than thirty years. In some ways they grew together and grew up together, and had she not died, they would have grown old together. That’s what a marriage is. What we have here isn’t a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in a jar for each day we have been married, and we took a penny away every day we’ve been apart, the jar would have been depleted a long time ago... The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can’t bear to hear about my days and I can’t bear to hear about yours.”

Her friend Andre claims more ground based on their lifelong kinship, and Celestial finally stops waiting for the end of her husband’s twelve-year sentence. These young men are careful in how they treat each other - both want Celestial, but both respect her career, her choices, her needs. And they respect each other, which doesn’t make it any easier when they finally face off as rivals.

These characters remind us of what “civilized” means: having a highly-developed society and culture; polite, urbane, refined. In our current climate of polarization and intolerance, such characters might seem quaint - yet it is their conviction that civility is essential that makes their dilemma so striking. It would be easy to put a gun in the hand of Roy, maybe Andre as well, but Jones has greater range than to settle for the predictable solution. She dives deep into her characters’ love and anger and loneliness, and doesn’t let anyone off the hook as their desires collide.

She offers us different versions of marriage: Roy’s mother, pregnant at 16 and abandoned by the baby’s father, meets Roy Hamilton who not only marries her and adopts the boy but loves him as a son, honoring him with his own name, fathering no other children who might displace his love for the boy. Celestial’s mother divorced, and her second match was for love. Andre’s father left his mother, marrying another woman and raising children with her - at which point Celestial’s father positioned himself as a father to Andre.

These families disapprove of the affection they observe blooming between Celestial and Andre - “Aren’t you still married?” - but in Roy’s absence, she discovers in her oldest friend a deep understanding she cannot push away. Jones doesn’t take sides - she gives as much weight to Roy Sr. and Celestial’s parents as to Celestial and Andre. All their convictions are heartfelt, and utterly at odds. Someone has to lose.

Here’s a sample of how she puts it:

Gloria [Celestial’s mother] said, “I raised her to know her own mind.”

My father [said], “What is all this stuff about love and her own mind?... What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn’t do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Though this is a story about marriage, it is also inescapably a story about what it is to be black in America. Roy’s college degree and rosy future mean nothing in prison - he is reduced to a man without agency. And it’s clear that if this can happen to him, it can happen to any man of color. When white people complain about the term ‘white privilege’, it is without experience comparable to a black man’s that demonstrates what that really means: the ground of assumption that one is dangerous, even criminal, regardless of one’s circumstances. ‘White privilege’ means one is not automatically at risk of suspicion or arrest or death for wearing a hoodie, browsing in a store, driving a car, renting an AirBnB ... anything you might do in the course of your life. I recently watched a YouTube video called “Birdwatching While Black,” a droll but not funny guide about how to avoid getting arrested or shot while in the field identifying birds, if you happen to be black.

Thank you, Tayari Jones, for making a world real, for plumbing the hearts of people who mean each other no harm, but who in the end lack the choice.

The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy

Every winter I read a big thick book. This year I chose The Forsyte Saga, which is actually three novels, linked by two short interludes.  The first volume, The Man of Property, was published in 1906, and the final book, To Let, in 1922. The saga is the history of an upper middle class English family whose older generation’s births spanned 1799 to 1820. These ten siblings, a selection of their children, and theirs, are the characters, in scenes set from around 1890 through the early 1920s.

“[Forsytes] are...half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable.”

In The Man of Property, Soames Forsyte is the epitome of the breed: quiet, snobbish, cold, proper, self-disciplined, possessive. Therein lies the tale. In his youth he meets a beautiful young woman, Irene, and determines to make her his wife. Through persistence he succeeds - but then she realizes she does not love him. To him, she is his most shining possession. To her, he is a jailer - the sumptuousness of her prison means nothing to her.

Irene meets a Forsyte cousin’s fiance, an architect, with whom attraction is immediate and profound. Soames engages the young man to design a house for him, and Bosinney, in consultation with Irene, builds the expensive lovely house, Robin Hill, in a bucolic spot not far from London. But Bosinney and Irene fall in love. He breaks his engagement, she breaks her marriage vows, he dies in an accident and she shuns Soames, who, repulsed by the thought of publicity, does nothing. They live separately, without communication, still married.

The first interlude follows: Indian Summer of a Forsyte, about the last years of Old Jolyon, Soames’s uncle. A great connoisseur of beauty, he buys Robin Hill, a purchase which at the time suits Soames, who hates the house but averts a scandal by not having to advertise it. Old Jolyon provides Irene money to live on, and wills her a generous stipend. He warms in her presence, and reconciles with his own son Jolyon (whose daughter was the architect’s fiancee) and his two children by his second wife.

Now the second novel, In Chancery, opens (chancery is court - the title refers to Soames assisting his sister in her divorce from her drunken spendthrift husband, and Soames finally pursuing his own divorce from Irene). Jolyon the younger, a watercolorist and also a great appreciator of beauty, is a complete anomaly in that acquisitive family. Eventually this Jolyon finds his way to Irene. Soames, by now older and desirous of an heir, finds her still so beautiful that he entreats her to come back and father a child for him. She repudiates him. At last he presses for divorce, to marry a young Frenchwoman he does not love, who bears him a daughter. In an ironic twist, Irene and Jolyon move to Robin Hill, where they have a son.

So ends the second volume. Now we have the weakest section of the book, the mercifully short Awakening, a treacly flight of fancy in the mind of Irene and Jolyon’s son Jon at age eight or nine.

The final book, To Let, opens with Jon and Fleur, Soames’s daughter, both nineteen, meeting by chance. Their cousin and his wife (first cousins to each other, in one of the durable love matches in the saga) host Jon at their country place, where Fleur comes to visit.  The two young people fall in love. Irene and Soames are both appalled by this liaison - the ugliness of their parting will not allow either to make rapprochement for their children’s sakes.

That’s the bare bones of the story. What makes it fascinating is, on the one hand, Galsworthy’s way of plunging the reader into a time and place foreign to us, but guiding us skillfully. Here’s what the Forsytes think of Bosinney’s death:

“In their hearts they would even feel it an intervention of Providence, of retribution - had not Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and the hearth?”

On the other hand, the full tale has the symmetry of a composition by Bach - parents who have no use for each other, children who fall in love. They neither lead their elders to reconciliation, nor go as far as Romeo and Juliet to tragic ends. And we see the importance of beauty and love in society - Jolyon wins Irene by gentleness, and by allowing her whatever freedom she wants. Soames, who clenches onto things and people, estranges his young second wife -

“He knew that she knew that they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.”

His only concern when she has an affair under his very nose, is its effect on his adored daughter: his daughter, he thinks of Fleur, not theirs.

Lest you think Soames a monster or a buffoon, you should read this trilogy - he is so fully developed and so thoroughly human that to scorn him is to scorn ourselves. The possessiveness that is his undoing is a family trait - he is only the most perfect manifestation of it. What he wants to possess is beauty - in addition to Irene, he amasses a formidable collection of paintings, which he chooses with an eye to resale value but nevertheless appreciates while they are his. When he visits the last member of his father’s generation - Uncle Timothy, now a hundred - he reflects that the house should be a museum, for it is a perfect representation of the bygone Victorian world. Every object, adornment, custom in the house exists in a backwater untouched by anything more recent than the Boer War. Yet Soames perceives that these furnishings that meant so much to his childhood have no value in the modern world.

Copious notes assembled by Geoffrey Harvey in the Oxford World Classics edition (1995) illumine Galsworthy’s references, enriching the story for a modern audience.

Step out of time - immerse yourself in a world better and worse than our own.