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Here’s something that will mess with your head: go see Fight Club, then immediately check out the new movie directed by Rob Reiner, The Story of Us. The weird thing is, their use of a common device -- narrating to the “fourth wall” -- makes them look like extremely mixed-up chapters from the same book, whose author just got a pharmaceutical gift certificate.
Story attempts to do in two hours something human beings have been struggling with since some poor Cro-Magnon man first got kicked out of the cave for eating his mother-in-law’s brain: understand how can two people who fell in love and raised a family have so much trouble staying together. We drop in on Ben and Katie Jordan (Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer), who after 15 years of mostly good, if rather trying, times have separated, waiting until their children are away at summer camp to spare them immediate emotional trauma. Each explains his/her side of the story to the audience and commiserates with friends (she with Julie Hagerty and Rita Wilson, he with Paul Reiser and Rob Reiner). A series of flashbacks and quick-cut montages explore their history, from first meeting when she was a temp in the TV production office where he was a sitcom writer, through a succession of less-than-successful counselors sought out after “fighting becomes the condition rather than the exception,” to the ambiguousness they share at being apart.
It’s a relatively sweet, true-to-life little tale, with an often verbally funny script (by “SNL” alumnus Alan Zweibel and Stepmom scribe Jessie Nelson), despite a pronounced tendency toward profanity on everyone’s part. Some of the other details are a bit weaker -- Willis’s idea of comedy can be too broad, frequently turning blustery and red-faced, but his character seems little at fault compared to hers, a neurotic, somewhat obsessive/compulsive control freak who never really explains what about him she objects to other than that he doesn’t wear a watch and would rather not stop right in the middle of lovemaking to write a note to the children since he figures it will keep until later. She ultimately redeems herself with a long, blubbering, but heartfelt monologue that can’t settle this eternal mystery, but leaves not a dry eye in the house. If nothing else, The Story of Us is memorable at least for the line, “The Ten Commandments were a lot easier to stick to when you dropped dead at 35; they should be amended, like the Constitution.” B-
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