"Cutie and the Boxer": Long-Married Artists Duke It Out

Hard to see, but they're boxing each other with paint

Pretty early on in "Cutie and the Boxer," I found myself thinking, "This isn't a movie about husband-and-wife artists; it's about a marriage."  Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (2014), this movie focuses on Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, Japanese artists who emigrated to the US in the late sixties/early seventies.

Ushio and Noriko Shinohara in a scene from "Cute and the Boxer."  A grin and a fist.

Guess what?  Noriko, 20 years younger and an artist herself, sacrificed for years to be her husband's assistant, cook, housekeeper, and mother to his child. (Somebody has to do it?)  By the time the movie was made in 2012, she's complaining about Ushio's dominance and sense of entitlement and beginning her own work, cartoonlike drawings about two characters:  Cutie and Bullie.

Noriko Shinohara preparing for her gallery debut, painting her characters Cutie and Bullie

Cutie has pigtails and big boobs and big dreams.  Bullie has his way with her.   In real life, Ushio says things like “the average person should help the genius,"  which makes me grind my teeth.  On the other hand, Noriko is now setting boundaries, carving out time to work on her art, complaining when Ushio gulps sushi that took time away from her art to prepare.

It's not black-and-white, though: good girl/bad guy.  There is love,  respect, and enduring affection that blunts what could be barbs.  The relationship has endured for 40 years, through Ushio's alcoholism, poverty, and raising a son who seems to be an alcoholic artist himself.    The marriage seems alive, nurturing, anything but static.

But the struggle!  Now 80 and 59, the  couple scrapes by, barely able to pay the rent on their Brooklyn loft.  At one point, Ushio jams several small splashy motorcycle sculptures into a roller bag and hauls them off to Japan to sell.  Noriko goes to ballroom dance lessons while he's gone, says the world "seems quiet" without him--and not in a bad way.  She bathes the cat (!), shows her work to a friend, continues documenting the lives of Cutie and Bullie.

One of Ushio Shinohara's larger motorcycle assemblages

Ushio comes home from Japan with $3500 and resumes his famous boxer paintings, where he punches paint onto huge canvasses with sponges attached to boxing gloves.( One painting:  2-1/2 minutes, according to Noriko; see him in action here.)  They're still broke, but he's stopped drinking, and Noriko finally gets a room of her own in their joint gallery show, "Love is a Roar."

The feminist in me wants to punch out Ushio, but the long-married woman who didn't change her name and has always insisted on a room of her own thinks marriage is complicated, and what  nuanced portrayal director  Zachary Heinzerling has pulled off.

Black on Red, Ushio Shinohara, 2012, one of his "boxer paintings"