Just perfect...

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

If you're a fan of classic movies or fashion then you know Audrey Hepburn. Her style is iconic. The characters she crafted for film are iconic. She, as an actress, humanitarian and human being is iconic. But perhaps you don't know this film of hers.Two For The Road takes you down that road where you get to spend your life with the one person you will love until you die. It gives you the 'happily ever after' everyone dreams of, and shows you how that 'happily' maybe isn't always so and that 'ever after' can be a long drudge til death, but it also shows you every little thing that fools you into thinking it's worth it. Our characters go through all the stages of every relationship but what's more they experience it. They don't let it just pass them by, building up to the inevitable conclusion of separation. They analyze, they endure, they work harder.Hepburn is perhaps at the best she's ever been. This role called for her to be airy and light, young and in love yet it also needed her to be jaded and wizened. She must bounce between ingénue and battle axe and she does so masterfully, never showing contempt for the work or the man that she loves. Finney is right up there with her. He matches her blow for blow as he passively judges and sneers at his wife one minute, then dotes on his new bride the next.The screenplay called for nuance and integrity. It called for heartache, heartbreak, loyalty and betrayal. But most importantly it called for determination. Hepburn and Finney show us all of the ups and downs of a relationship and just how worth it they feel it is. You can see how the negative aspects of love wear and tear at their heartstrings and win a few battles but the war is ongoing and they are determined to win. They show us all that love and the perfect relationship is not handed to you on a silver platter, but earned through the hard work you put into it year after year. 9/10

TWO FOR THE ROAD is a tepid, uninspired, faintly depressing "comedy" about a married couple on the edge of divorce who drive through France reminiscing about the past ten years of their marriage. It's like a very, very watered down version of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, minus the tragedy, minus the pain, minus the insights, minus the truth. Yet TWO FOR THE ROAD began life as something very different. Originally entitled "the Big Freakout," the original screenplay meant to showcase the return of screen darling Audrey Hepburn as a fiery vixen of revolution and social change. It was only when Hepburn herself read the script and began having terrible nightmares that the bland, marriage on the rocks story was concocted by studio hacks. The story opens with a preteen Audrey, squatting to urinate on the grave of Winston Churchill, who raped her mother while touring the East End during the darkest days of the London Blitz. Drooling and sneering, a stodgy MP listens to her story, calls her a liar, and then clubs her with an umbrella. Audrey is sentenced to ten years in a sadistic girls reform school. After a montage of lesbian sex, gang violence, and field hockey (all inter-cut with a scorching live UK performance of "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets) Audrey emerges from prison at the edge of womanhood, ready (as she puts it) for "loads of men, loads of fun, and loads of destruction!"Albert Finney first enters the film as a young Oxford lad presenting a paper on youth unrest in Britain. When a kindly professor suggests that the lad needs "street research" to "sharpen his insights" the gullible Finney immediately rents a cheap motorcar and goes cruising across the British countryside. The first person he meets is Hepburn, thumbing for a ride in the pouring rain while singing "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Beatles at the top her lungs. Finney and Hepburn immediately connect, having steamy sex in a barn to the sounds of "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. But when they wake up in the morning, their car is gone! Hepburn claims to know of a fortune in jewels buried in a nearby churchyard, and she leads Finney on a desperate scavenger hunt that swiftly leads to cannibalism, necrophilia, grave robbing, and blues wailing at a local club, where Audrey sits in as vocalist with the original 1964 lineup of the Animals, reunited for a smoking set that includes "Boom Boom," "House of the Rising Sun," "I'm Crying," and "Send You Back to Walker." At the end of the set, Audrey says quietly, "I died many years ago," blowing her brains out with a concealed pistol just as the police arrive. Back at Oxford, Albert Finney presents his paper on teen violence and street crime to a standing ovation and top marks. Wandering out into the yard, he sees a beautiful wild flower growing up between the bricks, the spirit of Audrey Hepburn set free at last.

TWO FOR THE ROAD is an authentic road movie, with opening credits of miscellaneous traffic signs bode the marital turbulence of a couple, the architect Mark Wallace (Finney) and his wife Joanna (Hepburn), who has been married for twelve years, and through the haphazard narrative jump-cuts, as the title suggests, the film presents them in a continuously mobile fashion, mostly in flashbacks, whether they are hitchhiking, carpooling with another married couple (including a fast-forwarding sight-seeing in Chantilly), or later they can afford to travel on their own, their trips in the magnificent European land evokes an evident whiff of lyricism intermingled with their personal romances and crises. Directed by the legendary Stanley Donen, and enabled by Frederic Raphael's wickedly astringent script, with golden maxim like "Marriage is when a woman asks a man to take off his pajamas because she wants to send it to the laundry." or "I still want a child, I just don't want that child."; and more strikingly, Donen discards the traditional linear account, instead he disarrays the over-one-decade time-span with sharp editing to hop erratically onto their various en route encounters and happenings, the film essays a full spectrum appraisal of what could happen during a relationship, from the budding romance, the unrestrained passion, the blithe squabbling alters into the bitter snide, the fatigue of bringing up a child, the extramarital affairs and finally spilling the beans of their dissatisfactions with blatant betrayal. Donen does go out on a limb to test the patience of its audience in this connubial fable. While the narrative can be problematic to grasp at times, for first-time viewers sometimes can barely be aware of which period our two protagonists are in the story, the movie's composition is as frequently changed as Ms. Hepburn's wardrobe, all too dashing and hasty to comprehend. The weightier challenge now falls on the shoulders of the two leads, which thankfully turns out to be truly amazing, despite of their seven-year age difference (in a rare case the woman is older), the Hepburn-Finney (aka. the bitch vs. the bastard) pair generates a waft of tangy chemistry on screen. There are good times when they are young and free, succumb to involuntary infatuation which can be viscerally affecting; in the bad times, they quarrel, dis each other. Hepburn contrives to give off a presence of corporeal concreteness instead of her more goddess-like persona, she is tormented by her ingrained insecurity and although we can tell youth is slowly eluding from her countenance, she holds on well throughout the varying phases due to her immaculate flair and unblemished self- respect projected in Joanna. Finney's Mark is flippant, volatile, flirty, even verges on male chauvinism, reeks of gentleman-like snobbishness, but his inner child never grow up during all these years.A young and gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset has a five-minute role in it, (auspiciously heralds her reunion with Finney in John Huston's UNDER THE VOLCANO 1984, 5/10), but the most joyous one in its merger supporting cast is William Daniels' Howard, the husband of Mark's ex-lover, he is a rigorous efficiency expert, surely the best expedition companion one can ever find if fairness is all you care. TWO FOR THE ROAD makes good use of the irrevocable fluidity of road-trip as a metaphor of one's tumultuous marriage journey, and it also shows audience a different Audrey Hepburn under the same dignified decorum, another good reason that the film should not be obliterated from a younger age group.

A wonderful,wonderful movie. I saw it first when it was released and could never get enough of it. I try to see it whenever I get the chance. The script by Frederic Raphael is sublime and the direction superb. Donen makes a great job of this movie I love it and his" Charade" also starring AH. All the supporting actors are just that-they support the leads and give the movie the atmosphere it needs to succeed.A special mention for Eleanor Bron who has been sadly underused in film (maybe her choice). One would have expected a film like this to have dated badly but I do not find that-it seems fresh every time I see it. It is funny,touching, romantic and above all witty. A really apt look at a relationship/marriage through several years. It says so much about male/female relationships without hitting its audience over the head with a metaphorical hammer.