45 Years

How many great movies could be written across the enigmatic, profound face of Charlotte Rampling? Hundreds? Thousands? At any rate, Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is one of them.

To know is not the same as to possess, and at any rate, possession is never permanent.

In the beautifully acted drama"45 Years," a marriage lives and dies; we watch its agonized struggle, like a butterfly impaled on a pin.

What's the big deal? How does an entire film come of this? There are satisfying answers to these questions, but to state them would be to ruin a perfectly good movie.

Daringly unsentimental, "45 Years" makes a persuasive case that marriage demands not only patience, but guts.

45 Years exposes the paradoxical balance of the successful marriage, one that requires a sentimental suspension of disbelief on the one hand and a hard-headed ability to deal with the everyday on the other.

transcends the obvious and touches on deeper, sometimes unsettling realities about the complicated, messy ways we live and love.

Rampling is a master at playing calculating, cold figures, hard, emotionless women who let nothing through their hard stare and locked expression. In 45 Years she lets the vulnerability show...

45 Years is a taut, extremely low-boiling portrait of marital strife.

Together with Haigh's unobtrusive direction, the stars make 45 Years one of the most honest and emotionally shattering movies about a marriage ever made.

If Haigh's film relies on the quiet and subtle, there's no mistaking the atomized emotional destruction going on between the characters. In their echoing silence, there contains multitudes.

To make this quiet drama work as well as it does requires actors who can operate in the subtlest of modes. For that, director Andrew Haigh has chosen well.