Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) -

A curious period piece that offers an ostensibly comic investigation into the dimensions of marital intimacy via a stunty narrative about "open marriage." The film opens as a privileged married couple Bob and Carol (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood, both innocuously adequate in the roles) arrive to a mountainside retreat center. We then follow as Bob and Carol participate in an "Encounter Group" session, an experience which radicalizes their approach to emotional honesty in their relationship. They giddily share the news over dinner with their best friends, Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon, respectively). Ted and Alice respond with polite, restrained smiles as Bob and Carol preach like true believers just returned from the mount. The rest of the narrative unfolds from this basic premise: Bob and Carol enact their new beliefs about emotional openness and radical truthtelling as Ted and Alice struggle to assimilate their friends' new beliefs into their own understanding of themselves. The twist comes with Bob has an affair while on a business trip, tells Carol in a gesture of radical emotional truthtelling, and Carol surprises them both by being gladdened by the fact that Bob told her. When Carol shares her happiness with Ted and Alice, expressing her joy that Bob told her of his own affair, the revelation rocks Alice especially to the core and instigates the film's main work of interrogating monogamous fidelity as a defining principle of a healthy marriage. Alice's unease drives the rest of the narrative, which includes both Carol and Ted pursuing their own casual affairs (Carol with the club's tennis pro; Ted's with a lady he met on a plane). The pivotal moment comes when, stunned to learn of both Carol's and Ted's affairs, Alice giddily demands that the two couples have an orgy to make good on all their newfound principles. The orgy almost happens, until Gould's Ted arrives to bed, and all four sit in bed (the iconic image from the film) getting increasingly uncomfortable. Then the next thing we see is the four of them, fully dressed in evening wear, as they parade out into the Las Vegas street, where a spontaneous multicultural encounter group seems to be beginning. The film is almost fascinating -- there are great period interiors and a couple of nice scenes. (I really like the staging of the first restaurant sequence, with the eavesdropping hostess and the table of curious queers. The opening scenes at the Encounter Group are similarly amazing and Alice's freakout at the nightclub is fun.) Cannon and Gould are very charismatic and quite charming, with Gould at the brief apex of his hotness. Culp and Wood, on the other hand, are aptly generic in the lead roles. But the film resonates with a coy self-satisfaction that doesn't feel very honest or, ultimately, very pleasant. There are feints toward contemplating the gendered differentials of swinging and open marriage, but those don't really amount to much. There's also an almost fascinating thread about how rich people perform their most intimate lives while (mostly Spanish speaking) servants are in close proximity, but this too seems ultimately ornamental. I was struck, watching this, how easily this film might be made today -- without changing much in the way of details -- say with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett...or some configuration of the Apatow set...the narrative would easily still work, which seems to me to be more an affirmation of the core conservativism/conventionality of the original narrative, rather than confirmation of its superficially countercultural aspirations. A startlingly conservative film, really, given all its trappings as a comedy about wife-swapping.