To some, Marriage Story might have triggered a yearning for other movies that tackle the same subject matter. Divorce is never a good thing to experience personally but when portrayed in films, it is much more palatable. Here is a ranking of some of the most amazing movies about divorce.
The Squid And The Whale, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay as the Academy Awards and it isn't hard to see why. The film mostly explores how jealousy and setbacks in careers can lead to tensions within couples and eventually cause messy divorces.
Divorce movies
Heartburn loosely tells the story of Nora's divorce from popular journalist Carl Bernstein. Streep plays Rachel, a budding writer, while Nicholson plays Mark, a political columnist who is cheating having an affair. Sadly, Nora died in 2012 but we are glad her real-life story inspired this beautiful film.
When a couple with one child divorces, the custody battle tends to be much tougher. Who will keep the child? According to The Parent Trap, couples with identicals twins can't relate to this. In the movie, a husband and wife file for divorce and decide that each of them will take one of the twins. Fair enough, but is it fair for the kids?
He makes a vow to be careful about who he falls in love with next but then he meets his childhood friend Polly (Jennifer Aniston) who throws him back into a chaotic world that he hopes to avoid. Alec Baldwin brings his charm here too. So, if you want a divorce movie that won't make you too sad, Along Came Poly is a good bet.
The movie follows three former college classmates who have been reunited by the suicide of another former classmate. While bonding, they realize that they have something in common. Their husbands divorced them for younger women. They thus decided to make hell rain on their former partners. The cast members jointly won a Best Acting by an Ensemble award at the National Board of Review Awards.
Under The Tuscan Sun is a movie that explores the much-ignored emotional struggles that come after divorce while also giving you a few laughs. In it, a professional writer called Frances Mayes is left with depression and writer's block after she parts ways with her husband.
Frances decides to go to Tuscany, Italy on vacation but she ends up loving the place so much that she buys a villa and settles there. She makes new friends while slowly recovering from her divorce. When she visits Rome one day, she bumps into a man called Marcello who inspires her to give love another chance.
Mr. Wonderful is another great comedy film from the 90s that sprinkles the laughs on the serious issue that is divorce. The plot? An electrician (Matt Dillon) has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug so he plans to purchase a bowling alley. Sadly, he doesn't have enough money to do so.
So what does he do? He plans to stop paying alimony to the woman he just divorced so that he can save up enough dough for his business venture. But he'll get sued right? Well, not if he finds her a man to marry. When she's someone else's wife, he won't be obligated to her anymore. But when he starts setting up dinner dates for her with various men, he begins falling for her once again.
Charlie and her husband initially want to separate amicably but their conflicting views set them up for a messy divorce. The film does a great job of revealing how career goals end up competing with love among married couples. Adam Driver also gives a memorable performance as Nicole's husband Charlie.
Philip Etemesi is an author, journalist, screenwriter, and film critic based in Nairobi. Kenya. As a child, he preferred watching movies like Goodfellas and North By Northwest instead of Home Alone. His girlfriend constantly has to pull him from the front of the TV, but he just keeps returning. Stubborn dude! An animal lover, Philip also has a pet giraffe called Refu.
In the movies of the 1970s and 1980s, which were a response to the social mores that followed the rise of women's liberation, divorce is a messy topic to write about. But, the films listed below capture a wide spectrum of emotional responses to breakups. Whether it be to laugh, to cry, or to identify with the kids affected by their parent's fallout, these are the best films about divorce.
While more focused on the husband (played by Dustin Hoffman) and his inability to grasp fatherhood off the shell-shock decision his wife made to divorce him, Kramer vs. Kramer is a delicate balance of the court procedures that follow, and how that affects the parent's social life. Also, showing great distress to the kid (Justin Henry) as he struggles to understand the situation, the film doesn't quite give enough time to Meryl Street, the wife, to share her story. The film is more a study of fatherhood than anything, but its raw, emotional power that comes from the talent of the actors makes it one of the best. If not for also being one of the first studio films to tackle what used to be a taboo subject.
The warm charisma of Robin Williams was the perfect actor to cast for the ultimate divorce fantasy. Directed with a light touch by Chris Columbus (Home Alone), Mrs. Doubtfire is about Wiliams' attempt to patch up his shortcomings as a husband to Miranda (Sally Field). While the depiction of a marriage falling apart is apt, it's a film more aimed at kids with one last hope they can save their relationships. With Williams enlisting the help of his brother, they create the persona of an old British nanny so that he can be around his family while his wife is busy with work. It's another hilarious turn from the imitable Williams, whose cosmic goofiness and illicit empathy make Mrs. Doubtfire's unlikely plot a warm and rewarding watch. If not needlessly hopeful, it's hilarious to boot.
An ensemble of great performances led by Angela Bassett, Whitney Houston, Lela Rochon, and the supremely underrated Loretta Devine, Waiting to Exhale exhibits the messiness of divorce and the importance of friendship when your love life is complicated. Directed by long-time actor Forest Whitaker, the film embarks on giving each character their due time, but also the one-off male encounters that shape their pain and yearning for love. With the all-powerful Bassett leading the way as she struggles to keep her sanity and kids together after finding out her husband is cheating, she is the film's emotional center and has the most iconic scene in the movie. The journey is a joyful but heartfelt rendering of four Black women leading the screen as they struggle to recapture what could be.
At the top of our list stands the all-time classic divorce flick, Kramer vs. Kramer. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep star as Ted and Joanna, a married couple going through a divorce and an ugly custody battle. The film does an excellent job at portraying the growing bond between workaholic Ted and the son he previously neglected and at showing the nuances that can be found even in complicated situations.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star in this tear-jerker that tries to answer a question many divorced couples have: What went wrong? The highly critically acclaimed film Blue Valentine shows scenes of the pair meeting and falling in love intertwined with scenes from their present. A present in which their love has all but disappeared and their relationship is on the verge of dissolution.
Movies often provide a window through which we can observe human behavior and legal institutions as they existed when the film was made. However, this is not true of the subjects of marital disintegration and divorce. Hollywood's rigid system of self-censorship, embodied in the Hays Code and the Production Code Administration, nearly blotted divorce themes right off the screen. What little was said of the subject during the middle third of the twentieth century was wildly wrong. The Code was written by and administered by staunch Catholics, largely to stave off boycott threats by the Catholic Legion of Decency. As a result, it reflected Catholic moral teachings, particularly the prohibition of divorce. This article surveys films about divorce from the pre-Code era (1930-34), the Code era (1934-68), and the immediate post-Code era (1968-1980s). It discovers that divorce themes were candidly portrayed during the pre-Code era but were thoroughly suppressed during the Code era. In the post-Code era, the subject crept back to the screen in a series of memorable films about divorce in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The article then analyzes Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) in detail, finding it to be one of the few classic treatments in film of divorce and family law.
When a married woman (Julia Roberts) realizes that her unhappy marriage is just the latest in a lifetime of failed relationships, she decides to seek experiences that she can marvel at. Her painful divorce catapults her into a one-year, round-the-world journey through Italy, India and Bali to find herself.
Our second Meryl Streep film, this emotional 1979 work takes a much more thoughtful look at the fallout of divorce. Dustin Hoffman plays Ted, a workaholic who is blindsided when his wife Joanna (Streep) leaves him and their young son, Billy. When she returns, a bitter custody battle ensues. This film took home five Oscars at the 52nd Academy Awards in 1980, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hoffman, Best Actress for Streep and Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for writer/director Robert Benton.
In this 2003 romantic comedy drama, Diane Lane plays recently divorced Frances, who escapes to Tuscany in an effort to move on. Her 10-day tour soon extends indefinitely when she sporadically puts an offer on a crumbling Tuscan villa. She experiences anger, frustration and sadness, which give way to acceptance, peace and of course, romance.
The below list of funny break up and divorce movies is not complete (there are hundreds more), but these are some of our favorites. It should also be noted that not all of these movies solely focus on divorcing or breaking up. Some of these films might only reference the topic once, but we feel that one reference is enough for that good laugh. 2ff7e9595c
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