It’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. Certainly, having got to know affable, driven, sweet-tempered Joel personally in this intimate portrait, it’s a natural desire to want to see even more of his extraordinary work: 60 years of photographs encompassing street photography, official documentation of the 9/11 disaster site in New York, still lifes and more.
At the same time, it’s also entirely apt that this feature isn’t just an adjunct to Meyerowitz’s career, given it is so profoundly about Joel and Maggie’s marriage, a kind of passionate truce (as its title suggests) between two equally forceful and charismatic characters. As we see here, the two struggle with the way Joel’s fame and career so often overshadow Maggie’s, personally and professionally. It’s a constant push-pull friction-producing mechanism that suddenly flares up into a massive dressing down from a furious Maggie, invoking decades worth of resentments and slights, when Joel carelessly refuses to take a phone call in another room from the one she’s resting in. The sequence is pure magic: fascinating, compelling and repellent in equal measure, spontaneous and just a bit performative too. It’s the kind of material that’s a cinematic Rorschach blot, capable of being read any which way, depending on the viewer’s perspective. And how apt it is that the film was itself made by a married couple, Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter – who, like Maggie and Joel, come from different cultures and disciplinary backgrounds.
Between the four of them, directors and subjects build up a portrait of the grace notes and grind of married life, a varied rhythm as quick as a game of ping-pong (Joel and Maggie are avid players) and slow as the sun traversing an empty apartment. A bravura opening montage in which the two narrate their lives up until they met gives way to a more observational style, with the mood shifting dramatically when Maggie suffers a serious injury and Joel must help nurse her back to mobility. It’s a salutary reminder that love never stops being challenging while also finding a way to meet the moment.
• Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is in UK and Irish cinemas from 21 March
