Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967)

I'm in a tailspin when I find myself agreeing with Pauline Kael instead of Dave Kehr. Kehr calls Two for the Road "arguably Stanley Donen's masterpiece" (oooh let's argue) whereas in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, Kael accurately targets "tedious running jokes" and concludes "the facile, comic bits set off audience expectations that are then betrayed, and the clever, bitter stuff just seems sour." For me, Two for the Road goes in my fundamental attribution error category not because the film commits it per se but because its obsessive focus on the heterosexual couple to the detriment of all other considerations contributes to the environment in which such errors are committed. 

For many, that's Two for the Road's most winning quality. In Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Henry Blinder praises screenwriter Frederic Raphael's "desire to create a film in which characters would simply 'live their lives'...[and] avoid, as much as possible, having characters that would represent anything: not the 'impossibility of human communications,' not the 'desirability of the married state.'" If that sounds compelling to you or even at all unique (don't most mainstream Hollywood films operate this way?), then you're free to find yourself in Audrey and Albert's cutesy, temporally jumbled, exquisitely costumed foibles. Me, I'll stick with Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Palm Beach Story, both of which imagine wider, richer contexts beyond their characters' most immediate self-regard.

Grade: B-minus