'The Overnight' Tests Marriage's Fundamental Flaw: Monogamy

The Overnight film review
Adam Scott and Jason Schwartzman discuss sharing Taylor Schilling

Ever since Strangers on the Train, the immoral proposal has been a favourite film premise. In Hitchcock's tour de force, two men are travelling in the same compartment – a tennis player stuck with a vulgar wife and "Bruno", who resents his father. Bruno offers the tennis player a swap: if the other man promises to murder his father, he will kill the tennis player's wife.

While the pact in Strangers is criminal, it became sexual in Indecent Proposal (1993). A destitute couple stranded in Las Vegas are approached by a mysterious gentleman who offers them $1m to spend one night with the wife. While the stories are different, they are in essence variants of the same Faustian theme.

In The Overnight, the moment of temptation comes late, almost an hour in. Kurt, an enigmatic new neighbour, (Jason Schwartzman) says to Alex (Adam Scott), his house guest of the evening: "At this stage in your relationship it's OK for you to think of doing other things and, in some cases, considering to do those things." What this means (or what one is led to believe), is that Kurt proposes the two men swap wives for the rest of the night.

But let's briefly rewind to see how the two very different characters got into this situation. Alex is the very opposite of a "swinger". He is painfully uptight and has an awkward sex life with equally repressed wife Emily (Taylor Schilling). The film even starts with a sex scene at the climax of which their little son bursts into the room.

The couple run into Kurt, a man who embodies everything that complex-ridden Alex isn't. Alex and Emily are eager to make friends as they are new in California, so they take up Kurt's invitation to his house for dinner and to meet his French wife Charlotte (Judith Godrèche). At this point, the film-makers add a ladle of cliché, portraying Charlotte as the embodiment of sexual prowess. In France, we learn, everything is done the relaxed way and, judging by The Overnight, it's a miracle the women of Paris don't walk the streets naked.

Then the kids are packed off to bed, drugs taken, clothes removed for the pool and so on until the aforementioned offer is tabled. The saving grace of this chain of plot points is the occasional sound acting performance, particularly that of Godrèche who soldiers through the film with admirable pluck. Late in the game, several twists vaguely spice up the story, but at this point viewers may have already lost patience.

The Overnight's shortcomings are all the more vexing because its variation of the "pact" premise could have taken it far. There is a flaw in the concept of marriage, namely that being monogamous and having children does not agree with many people's sex lives. This may sound like a cheap truism, but there is plenty of evidence to back it up. A recent survey by market research group Fittkau & Maaß found that less than half of men in permanent partnerships said they were sexually fulfilled and 28% of married men stated they were "unhappy" with their sex life. Women were slightly more content, with 53% fulfilled.

That sex is only one facet of a marriage may not console those afflicted. The Overnight might have encouraged its audience to sort through the challenges of their partnerships, and perhaps entertained those without such issues along the way. Instead it fails to hit the mark, settling for a farce that feels like it came straight from the drawing-board, not from the heart.

Comedy couples

Marriage is funny because it is so obviously flawed. Comedies have taken enormous pleasure in the foolishness of those challenged by their fidelity. While The Seven Year Itch with Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe did so peddling narrow 1950s morality, the protagonists are tripped up with glee in later comedies such as the Mexican Sex, Shame and Tears (1999), in which two feuding couples fight so hard that the two men move in together, as do the two women, and a trench war begins between the genders.

Uncommon Knowledge

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Rudolph Herzog

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