Although Woody’s last couple of films were underrated, they were not great works, by any means. It would take two years for Woody to return with another true drama, and thus triumphantly close his decade-and-a-half Golden Age. In some ways, Husbands and Wives is the most pure look at ‘Woody’ relationships, and one of the more intimate and best films of his career. In short, if ANNIE HALL was a kind of grown-up ‘first’ for Woody as well as Alvy Singer, and MANHATTAN too odd — it dealt with a grown man and a seventeen year-old girl, after all — or HANNAH AND HER SISTERS too marred by the ‘big problems’ of infidelity, familial conflict, and the like, to really get at the core of romance itself, this film merely examines the inner workings of two marriages, and what the interactions in one say of the events in the other, and vice-versa. It is, then, the most vanilla of the aforementioned films, but while there are no truly arresting visuals, no haunting metaphors, nor moments of ‘perfect poetry’ or scoring, this in no way detracts from what the film actually does. It is hyper-realistic, down to the documentary style, complete with questions and answers that shed light (and not) on those involved, and the quick edits and ‘jagged’ handheld camera that gets into the actors’ faces, showing not only why their marriages disintegrate, but also how the characters themselves are part of a self-imposed pattern they do not understand. […]