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TIL DEATH DO US PART

1998

A centerpiece of the filmmaker’s family dramas, this is the ultimate he said/she said tale, Rashomon in twenty minutes, as, back and forth, Kleine’s parents offer, to their probing filmmaker daughter, versions of a 55-year marriage. The stories couldn’t possibly be more variant: the dentist dad, smug and deeply satisfied by his uncomplicated, unexamined life: a lucrative dental practice, high-earning investments, a “successful” marriage; the dreamy,  drama-queen mom,  agonizing over a half-century of being stuck with a boorish, brutish husband. Suddenly revealed, like in Joyce’s The Dead, is a romance she experienced so long ago, still casting a regretful shadow over a half-century of Long Island matrimony. Gerald Peary