04/15/10 - Group Marriage

Group Marriage (1973, 85 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068664/

Another Wednesday means another oddball movie choice. This one was introduced by director Stephanie Rothman as a film that she wrote (with others) to explore what a group marriage constitutes and the results that come from one.

The film, then, obviously explores a group marriage built around six individuals. All these characters share approximately equal screen time so I'm not going to name all of them. Split evenly to be three guys and three gals the group learns what the consequences of a group marriage are.

Naturally, because of the introduction to the film, I attempted to watch this film with these questions in mind. For the most part they were answered. However, as the director also mentioned, the higher up people demanded there be nudity in the film. Because of this I feel that sometimes they couldn't explore some themes as much as they wanted since they were forced to incorporate scenes they probably didn't want in there. Similarly, they had to throw some humor in and whatever they thought was humor sure didn't come off that way. The humor in the film seems to come in bunches where there's about three or four sections of around five minutes where the film attempts to cram in way too many jokes. Also at this point the characters become morons as they do stupid stuff they wouldn't do any other way. The far and away the worst part of the film.

As for the characters, they were created pretty well. Really, they don't need any introduction because as soon as they are introduced they are so flat that as a viewer you already know everything about them. Obviously for a film of this sort, they aren't trying to create six fully dimensional characters but instead explore themes between personalities. As it turns out, it mainly works out for the best that this approach is used. As I said above though, when the "humor" comes through, all this is thrown out the window as in the attempts to make everything funny it just ends up making everyone stupid.

Overall, I gave this film a 4/10. Group Marriage does what it set out to do for the most part. However, with a poor production quality (sometimes due to the nature of the film but sometimes not such as when the camera can't maintain focus on anything during one scene) and some bad writing choices, the end product is hurt. However, it was a lot better than some of the other Wednesday films I've seen in the past.