Movies about broken people

You know, it's interesting .... Normally I go out of my way to communicate with Wife as little as possible; but after the last two movies I've seen I have shot her a quick note each time suggesting she go see them: I mean "Where Did You Go, Bernadette?" and now "Judy". So I started mulling why that might be?

 

The first thing is that in both movies there is something about the main character that reminds me of Wife.

• With Bernadette it is her problematic social skills (and total lack of interest in improving them), and her general contempt for the people around her. Nonetheless Bernadette gets something kind of like a happy ending, so in a way I suppose my subtext to Wife was, "Get up and go DO something and you'll be happier than you are just sitting around!"
• With Judy Garland it is her narcissism, her magical thinking, her roller-coaster emotions, and her total inability to see herself from the outside. (Though the boys tell me that Wife has gotten better about the roller-coaster emotions now that she has been ordered to give up drinking for good.) Of course in real life Judy Garland didn't get a happy ending, but I also know that Wife is a big fan of hers.

So in a sense both movies are about broken people, and I wonder if that is what I have a taste for ... or at any rate an interest in. Of course it is also true that in both cases the main characters are not simply broken: Bernadette and Judy each has some kind of greatness in her past and somehow in her reach if only she can figure out how to stretch out her hand towards it. And for me that makes the stories more interesting and more poignant. Hell, there was a long time when I tried to find some way to tell myself that kind of story about Wife, as a way to reconcile myself to the way that she seemed to be caving in before my very eyes. Ultimately of course I realized that was the wrong story template in a number of ways, and also that the features which I was seeing ever more clearly had in truth been there all along. But clearly that hasn't diminished my interest in brokenness ....