Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is a documentary portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed for his pioneering use of colour in the 1960s when only black and white images were taken seriously as an art form. My European Trip: Photographs from the Car, his debut show at MOMA in 1968 was a breakthrough. Hugely successful gallery shows around the world and countless books have followed.
Meyerowitz has never lacked for acclaim and the opportunities that it can bring. When the World Trade Centre was attacked in 2001, he was the only photographer allowed unrestricted access to record images of Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath.
Yet co-directors Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet are less interested in admiring Meyerowitz’s oeuvre than observing his marriage with Maggie Barrett, a frustrated artist. We are given a rapid resumé of the couple’s colourful former lives. There are ex-spouses, assorted battles with addiction and estranged children littering the whirlwind of their past relationships, all seemingly cast aside when they met and fell in love in middle age. Frustratingly, these brief references to skeletons in closets don't get a further airing in this documentary; the filmmakers seem happy to remain inside their hermetic relationship.
They certainly make a beautiful couple, an advert for grace in old age. And while Meyerowitz is going strong at 84 - we are treated to several sequences of his impressive dancing skills - the equally svelte and lithe Barrett is pretty furious to find herself having to learn to walk again at 75 after a car accident. Getting her back on her feet clearly puts a strain on her temper but her determination is admirable.Directors Perlmutter and Ouimet (themselves a couple in real life) seem to have embedded themselves thoroughly in the trenches of Meyerowitz and Barrett’s marriage. A film camera is there in the bedroom, waiting to film the couple when they wake up in the morning, recording every adoring conversation and loving glance. It can at times feel a bit contrived and suffocating as the couple move from one beautiful home in the golden Tuscan hills back to a light-filled apartment in New York.
The slightly cloying nature of the documentary is redeemed by one outstanding scene. Provoked by having to move home, Barrett lays into Meyerowitz at length. She expresses all her rage at how her own life and artistic identity have been subsumed and sidelined by his. She complains that her paintings have never been taken seriously; her novel had to be self-published. The camera holds on Barrett as she harangues her husband, whose every attempt to redeem himself provokes yet more rage. Both seem very aware that they are being filmed, at times one can almost feel Meyerowitz performing contrition not just for Barrett but for the documentarians.
This electrifying sequence is not quite enough of a payoff and certainly doesn’t turn Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other into another Anatomy of a Fall, but it certainly helps make the documentary more than just another artist’s hagiography.
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