Just Married (2003) – on rental. There’s a whole ton of romantic-comedies about two unlikely persons meeting and falling in love, with many having the two persons at the marriage altar at the film’s end. There is precious few about making marriages work, and even less about a new marriage.
Just Married, as the title goes, is about a young couple who’s just got married – but by the end of the film’s first 2 minutes, you’ll realize that their marriage is already in trouble! The two return from their dream honeymoon in Europe but are clawing at each other’s throats. About four-fifths of the film is tracing back what happened in the last months, their first meeting, their marriage and then their honeymoon – before returning back to the present in the film’s last 20 minutes to wrap up the story.
The two leads are Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy who plays Tom and Sarah respectively. The two’s characters couldn’t be more different. Tom’s a laid-back stand-by radio personality who does the dead-of-the-night traffic updates, while Sarah is the daughter in a very wealthy family. The two fall in love and get married in spite of prejudices coming from Sarah’s family, then are off to their honeymoon where the trouble starts.
Some of their misadventures have an air of familiarity – not from that we’ve actually experienced it ourselves mind you but rather it’s the sort of thing newly weds might do: including a scene about how they decide to try joining the mile-high club, a scene involving travel power adapters while on vacation, about the perceived quality of luxury hotels in romantic getaways, and cockroaches that make an appearance when the two try to make-out. And speaking of the latter, Ling normally freaks out when she sees cockroaches (i.e. she’ll scream “DARLING HELP!!!!!”, and I’ll come rushing into the kitchen “What what WHAT??” only to learn that there’s a roach about, er, somewhere), but she actually laughed at that this scene.
Just Married worked for me for two reasons. For starters, the series of misadventures and scenes which increasingly show how different both characters are aren’t overplayed. They do try to work out their differences early on, exhibit tolerance and understanding until their level of mutual antagonism builds up to the point where it finally explodes. Secondly, the two actors fit their roles well: you get Kutcher’s Tom who gradually realizes the level of distrust and prejudice Sarah’s very elite family has on his ordinary background, and Murphy’s Sarah who also realizes that her husband can be a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to money matters. Both are believable, and there’s evident chemistry between the two.
Funnily, the film according to IMDB and its Wikipedia’s entries received mostly negative reviews, and from viewer comments I can see where they’re coming from. Most of the laughs in Just Married did work for me, including aforementioned roach and the mile-high club scenes, but a few also felt forced: for example a couple of short scenes involving Sarah’s mother’s name which revolves around the nickname for a certain genital, and others about the family’s Asian butler. And the several of the cast of supporting characters are pretty much fillers with little to do in the film.
Still, the both of us enjoyed Just Married, and for me certainly a lot more than The Ugly Truth. The film was also made poignant by the fact that Brittany Murphy was found dead just last month at the young age of 32. R.I.P.:(
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