Illustration by Victor Juhasz

It only took filmmaker Jim Strouse three months in New York City to fall in love. He moved here from Indiana straight out of college, and for years after, he and his girlfriend had the perfect arty bohemian relationship. They made films together, they made kids together—it was all happening.

But then suddenly it wasn’t. Sometime around the birth of their second child, the relationship started to fray. They went to couples therapy, but then came the infidelity and the screaming matches and the second apartment.

When it came time to call it quits, there was only one problem: how could they get divorced when they had never gotten married in the first place?

“It’s really complicated,” said Mr. Strouse, 36. “We never got lawyers involved. It got close many times, but it was weird, it was strange. We were just winging it from day to day with the kids.”

Marriage rates in the United States are at record lows. And when more than half of children born to women under the age of 30 have unwed parents, according to Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center on children and youth issues, more and more couples are finding themselves in such relationship limbo. As Richard Fry wrote in an article on the Pew Research Center website, “Marriage increasingly is being replaced by cohabitation, single-person households and other adult living arrangements.” And with kids in the picture, breaking up has become that much messier.

Whereas married couples go through the Supreme Court to have their unions formally dissolved, unmarried couples are forced to navigate the nebulous world of child custody, alimony and asset negotiation on their own. Or worse, in Family Court.

“I understand the value of marriage, because the commitment is on paper and there’s a legal process to getting out of it,” said Mr. Strouse, whose own breakup dragged on for years. “When you’re not married, it’s really ... There was no process to go through.”

In some ways it makes sense that the current generation of baby-makers has become wary of the big M. Many grew up in broken homes as divorce rates climbed over 50 percent in the late 1970s and 1980s, according to census data. No one wants to relive the bitter divorce that his or her parents endured.

But here’s the fallacy: keeping your union unofficial in the eyes of the state doesn’t make your relationship immune. In fact, according to research from the University of Michigan, unmarried couples with children are far more likely to split than their married counterparts: 66 percent of cohabiting couples separate by the time their child is 10 years old, versus 28 percent of married couples.

“Marriage as an entity in itself seems to mean something to people,” said Jean Fitzpatrick, a New York City-based marriage counselor. “They talk in terms of wanting to save their marriage, not only in terms of wanting to stay with the person. The marriage seems to have a kind of value.”

“Getting married is kind of like closing the door in some ways,” said Mr. Strouse. “When you’re not married, the door is always open, and that was confusing. Even when we had a terrible fight, it always felt like I could just leave now and it doesn’t matter, because we never got married. The lack of legal, formal commitment did not help.”

Mr. Strouse paused before continuing: “It’s helpful to get married, if you want to get divorced.”

Ariel Boles is a 37-year-old freelance lighting designer who says he never wanted to tie the knot. When Mr. Boles and his girlfriend fell in love, and when she got pregnant, nine months after they first met at a friend’s party, the topic of formalizing their love via marriage never even came up.

“I come from divorced parents,” he explained. “My mom has been married three times and my dad is gay, so I just don’t come from marriage, from a family of marriage, where it’s an institution that’s been around, much less venerated.”

Longtime partners Darren Aronofsky and Rachel Weisz didn’t stay together for the kid.

Eighteen months after the birth of their child, the couple split up. Only then did Mr. Boles start viewing the institution in a different light. “After going through this whole thing, I actually now think marriage would help, like taking that extra step is empowering for some reason,” he said. “For me, at this point, I think it would encourage me to work it out and stay together.”

As it is, both Mr. Boles and his ex have unpredictable work schedules, and even now, more than four years later, they have not come up with a concrete custody calendar. And as can be the case for many splitting parents, Mr. Boles admits, “There’s an alimony situation.”

The couple tried to work things out through conversations, but there were rough patches. During one such patch, Mr. Boles’s former partner got a lawyer, who went through his financial information and helped steer them toward an agreement, which Mr. Boles said is “not, like, written in paper” but entails a shared bank account.

“I trust she’s taking what she needs and nothing more,” he said, but added that perhaps it would be simpler if there were a more defined arrangement. “Sometimes I wish we were cut off completely and I would just hand her a check every month.”

But not all single mothers have a man who holds up his end of the partner bargain like Messrs. Boles and Strouse try to. Indeed, according to divorce lawyer Steven Mandel, one of the biggest advantages of getting that official document declaring you man and wife is legal protection.

“Say you have two people, a couple, and they have the same income and job, and then the woman has a kid and decides to stay home for five years to take care of it. And then, when the kid’s in kindergarten, the man says, ‘I’m out of here.’ If they were never married, he’s not obligated to give her a dime [beyond child support],” said Mr. Mandel. “If they were, he would have to give her rehabilitative maintenance so she can go out there and get a job. He’d have to pay her alimony, a whole bunch of things.”

Other legal benefits include equitable distribution of assets, inheritance and health coverage. And as Mr. Mandel made clear, the person who usually suffers in a non-married separation is the woman.

Take, for example, the case of Pam, who asked that we use only her first name. A fiery redheaded businesswoman and single mother, Pam could have very much used legal protection when she found out she was pregnant seven years ago and her boyfriend completely flaked. “He said, ‘I don’t love you and I don’t want to get married. What am I supposed to do with the other two girls I’m seeing?’” the 44-year-old remembered.

With the support of friends and family, Pam carried to term. Her partner didn’t show up at the hospital when she was delivering—on the birth certificate, under the line for “father,” there was just a blank space—and she has never received a single check from him, though they did resume their relationship for a period later on.

“I think if we were married and then divorced, there would be a custody and alimony arrangement,” she said. “My son would be better off because there would be more money coming in, and he would spend more time with my ex because he would be obligated to.”

Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn were way ahead of the no-marriage curve.

Now Pam’s ex has a perfunctory relationship with his son, but for weeks after the birth, he didn’t even acknowledge that he had one. And even then, she says, he demanded a paternity test, which came back positive. Still, he resisted putting his name on the birth certificate. And Pam admits she has not pressed the issue:

“The second I put his name on the birth certificate, I actually give him a vote, and for right now, even though it’s very difficult and I struggle financially and I’m lonely sometimes—more lonely than you can even imagine—[my son] goes to the school that I think he should go to, [he] goes to the after-school program that I think he should go to,” and so on.

Perhaps the one major theme among all the non-married parents we spoke with was a clear desire to do what was best for the kids. In fact, each couple at one point or another tried to give their relationship a last-gasp go of it, even when they knew it was doomed.

“My brother would constantly ask me if I was concerned about bringing a bastard child into the world,” remembered Mr. Strouse. “He didn’t mean it. He said it so casually. It was more his worry about society’s judgment than his own.”

But data does support the advantages of marriage. As the Child Trends website says, “statistics show [children born outside of marriage] are more likely to be poor, to experience multiple changes in family living arrangements, and to have cognitive and behavioral problems such as aggression and depression than are children born to married parents.”

Just last week, The Wall Street Journal published an article adapted from a joint report by the National Marriage Project, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and the Relate Institute looking at the phenomenon of unmarried motherhood. “Without a stable family,” the piece reads, “[the children’s] chances of moving up the education and income ladder are stunted, which—in turn—reduces their odds of getting married as adults.”

Which brings us to the issue of relationship modeling.

“The cloudiness around our separation was definitely the worst part of our relationship, looking back,” said Mr. Strouse, adding that his 8-year-old daughter has already sworn off marriage. “Kids need to know what’s going on, and things were so unclear for so long, I think it was even more strange and confusing for the children.”

According to Pam, part of this spreading epidemic is due to too many people holding their prospective spouses to an unreasonably high standard, which leads to situations such as her own.

“Marriage is a business, in my opinion, and it has only been in the last 50 or so years that it has been about this love thing,” she said. “It’s like running a boring corporation. The people who think it’s different are the ones who end up getting divorced. People that go into it knowing that it’s a business, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, will last forever.”

“They've come into our little town and they really have done their job: They've shooed us out,” Ms. Hawn told the Aspen Times. She also said that in the past she could walk around Aspen without being hounded by photogs, and the few shutterbugs the town did attract were apparently discreet.

“But it ain't like the old days anymore,” Ms. Hawn said, adding: “You find yourself running and dodging and jumping in your car. I can't go into my own town. I hurt for my children. It's not fair.” She also remarked on how the paparazzi like to chase her famous daughter, 28-year-old actress Kate Hudson.

When Ms. Hawn went to the mayor, Mick Ireland, to complain, the politico curiously told her to start taking pictures of the paparazzi, effectively turning the tables. “Anything we would do would just make it worse,” Mr. Ireland said. “There’s no safe haven.”

Considering the deplorable way things are going at the movies in general, and the dearth of roles for mature women in particular, a boy like moi is lucky to catch even one of his favorite actresses above the title of anything on the screen today. Imagine my joy to find two of them together at the same time! Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon are an inspired dream team in a riot called The Banger Sisters . They are riper, looser and dreamier than ever.

To lure these A-list glitter-moths back to the cinematic flame, you'd need a challenging and totally original idea, and Vancouver writer-director Bob Dolman has come up with a honey. In the days of rock 'n' roll groupies, a pair of crazy, carefree gal pals named Suzette (Ms. Hawn) and Vinnie (Ms. Sarandon) were the queens of the good-time girls-two stage-door sluts who screwed every stoned freak with an electric guitar between his legs, a marathon of sexual endurance which inspired Frank Zappa to nickname them "the Banger sisters."

The label made them legends. But times change, like music, values and lives. It's been more than 20 years since they've seen or even corresponded with each other. Vinnie is now Lavinia, a respectable suburban matron in pearls and perfect pastels, a pillar of the community living like Martha Stewart in a swanky house in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a golden retriever, two teenage daughters and a rich lawyer husband running for political office. Lavinia has successfully deleted all traces of Vinnie from her data base and would like to forget the past, while Suzette still knocks herself cross-eyed trying to relive it.

Suzette is an over-the-hill hippie with tattoos, brio, hair spray and Talking Heads records-a flamboyant farrago of outdated fuchsia. Suzette still digs big hair, Country Joe and the Fish, and cocktails with bamboo umbrellas sticking out of pineapple slices. Her proudest claim to fame is the night Jim Morrison passed out underneath her while "in the act." But if Suzette is kind of desperate and sad, Vinnie is even more delusional. Far removed from the long-ago wild and crazy life, one broad needs a bit less of the past to put the future in its proper perspective, while the other one needs a little more of it to put some fun into the present. It's time for a reunion.

Broke and unemployed, the dishy Suzette piles into the blue jalopy she calls "the Shitbox" and heads for Arizona to borrow a few thousand from her old sidekick. On the road to enlightenment, she picks up a nervous, anal-retentive nerd on his way to Phoenix to murder his father. This third cog in the wheel is brilliantly played in the Peter Sellers tradition by a hilarious Geoffrey Rush. The culture clash is instantaneous: When Goldie Hawn, in her tiger-skin pedal pushers and purple tank tops, invades the suburban world of ritzy white columns and spacious green lawns, freaking out Susan Sarandon in her tailored Barbara Bush ensembles the color of a Greyhound bus station, the laughs are guaranteed.

But The Banger Sisters is also poignant and thoughtful, with real dialogue and character development. In her frazzled, tacky way, Suzette is the one who turns out to have the logic and the integrity. In her own symmetrically dysfunctional way, Vinnie is the one whose perfect life turns out to be a mess, whose husband takes her for granted and whose daughters have serious problems of their own. Poor Geoffrey Rush just needs some Viagra. Before it's over, Suzette liberates them all. She crashes Vinnie out of her beige cocoon, and they stage one last mutiny as middle-aged disco dollies-only to discover that, at their age, things are definitely not the same. Vinnie appears to have it all, but she's lost herself along the way. Suzette hasn't got two quarters to rub together, but despite her breast implants and a wardrobe even Tina Turner wouldn't be caught dead in, she can still teach a few old dogs some new tricks. By the end, everyone learns that it doesn't matter how you live your life; it's how true you are to yourself that counts. Suzette probably can't count to 10, but like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday , she knows the value of freedom to the human heart.

The film's three Oscar-winning stars shine like Christmas ornaments. Mr. Rush is a major comic discovery as a doofus who turns his own life around after one night in Goldie's hotel sheets. Ms. Hawn's hoarse giggle, twitching lips and big gumdrop eyes make Suzette a tomato to die for. (It makes me sick to think of the vivid, vivacious roles Hollywood never asked her to play; what rapture it would have been to see her tackle Born Yesterday , Sweet Charity or Chicago .) Ms. Sarandon is a crisp counterpart to Goldie's bona fide dingaling charm, balancing their duet with pragmatism, polish and moo-cow eyes. They're two sides of the same coin, fresh from Fort Knox and ready to spin. (Opens Sept. 20.)

A Preppy's Lost Illusions

Igby Goes Down , a dark, quirky and relentlessly fascinating first feature by the promising director Burr Steers, takes a fresh, insightful look at an old familiar movie staple: dysfunctional WASP's and their tortured, overeducated and precociously rebellious offspring. From John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down to Robert Redford's Ordinary People , right down to more recent entries like The Royal Tenenbaums and Tadpole , the movies have an enduring obsession with telling stories about the angst-ridden preppie teens of dysfunctional families, but no one has told one better than Mr. Steers, and it's been a long time since the screen has produced a more charmingly muddled or more consistently interesting kid than 17-year-old Jason (Igby) Slocumb. Smartly and sarcastically played by Kieran Culkin, Igby is Holden Caulfield on Special K.

The old adage that money and privilege can't buy happiness is an outmoded and simplistic supposition that is often easily disproved. But in Igby's case, a lifetime of rejection has produced battle wounds. The ennui and insecurity derived from a cold Connecticut childhood and family experiences that are anything but unconventional have left him understandably nervous, distracted and high-strung. Dad (Bill Pullman) showed early signs of schizophrenia by appearing nude at the family dinner table and has now been locked away in a rest home for distinguished breakdowns that is draining the family of its old inherited money. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is a pill-popping hypochondriac who is slowly dying of breast cancer. Handsome older brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) is a materialistic conservative majoring in economics at Columbia who regards his younger sibling as a cruel trick of biological fate and a royal pain in the ass. ("If Gandhi had spent any prolonged amount of time with you, he would have kicked the living shit out of you!")

Everyone is so self-absorbed they've ignored Igby all of his life. Kicked out of prep schools, a military academy and a drug-rehab clinic for majoring in attitude, Igby finally stages his own declaration of independence and goes on the lam in Manhattan with his mother's credit card. A rich kid out of control in the bohemian underworld quickly finds a lot of fast company, including a cynical Bennington girl with a semester off (Claire Danes) and a wealthy godfather (Jeff Goldblum) with a house in the Hamptons, a wife Igby describes as "no longer the sharpest tool in the shed," and a drug-dealing mistress (Amanda Peet) who betrays them all.

Igby is the camera that records their quirks and their barbs, while bopping his way through fields of drugs, false values, insanity, one mercy fuck and, eventually, even a mercy killing. Inevitably, Igby must go down, smashing into a brick wall of disillusionment and the death of idealism, and when it happens, it's heartbreaking.

I won't reveal the details or share the specifics. I don't want to risk dissuading prospective ticket-buyers from the perceptive and engaging experience that awaits them. I can tell you the magnetic cast is uniformly thrilling, and the sometimes-disturbing events that shape Igby's lost illusions are always leavened by Burr Steers' meticulous direction and witty writing. He's a director worth keeping an eye on. He can touch you deeply, then make you think and laugh at the same time. (Ms. Danes, upon meeting Mr. Phillippe, a beautiful lockjawed snob, for the first time: "So you're the fascist brother." Igby: "He prefers 'Young Republican.'") The lines just keep on coming, adding ballast and humor to Igby's sad plight. The audience roared with surprise when someone laments the fate of a drag queen whose show has just flopped: "I told her Lorna Luft is just too obscure-people will think you're just doing a bad Liza!"

I really loved this movie. If a kid this sensitive, appealing and deserving of attention goes down, I want to go down with him. (Opens Sept. 13.)

An Untold Holocaust Chapter

Shanghai Ghetto is a don't-miss documentary about a hidden chapter in the history of shame, one that has never been told before. Produced and directed by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann, and narrated by Martin Landau, it tells what happened in 1939 to thousands of Jews who fled Nazi Germany after all exit visas were denied and the doors of embassies everywhere (including America) were closed. As one survivor says: "The world didn't give a damn."

The only port that welcomed refugees without papers was Shanghai. The Chinese were in worse shape under Japanese rule than the Jews, so there was no anti-Semitism, no criticism and no questions asked. There was also no drinkable water, no toilets and no employment. Conditions were overcrowded, unsanitary and politically corrupt. But in the struggle to find temporary hospitals and communal kitchens, two different cultures merged with music, medicine and mutual respect, and out of nothing the resourceful Jewish outcasts created poetry, cabaret, boxing and soccer teams, and makeshift ways to earn money.

Things got worse when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Japan and Germany became allies, and the occupation government began imprisoning both the Jews and the British who had helped them survive. Shanghai became a tug of war between two enemy nations and a military target for American bombers.

It is wrenching to see grown men and women revisit the ghetto where they lived as children piled 10 to a room, counting to see who could find the most bugs in their food. From family photos, interviews and action footage of the burning synagogues of Kristallnacht , up to the modern-day Shanghai where the Jewish ghetto remains unchanged, the Amins have constructed a wrenching dossier of mortgaged lives and surrendered dreams that cannot fail to render you speechless. Like all great films about a life you never knew existed, it offers much to absorb and even more to think about after the final frame. Arriving on the anniversary of 9/11, Shanghai Ghetto is a powerful, disturbing and eye-opening film about aggression and its aftermath that makes you doubly glad to be alive. (Opens Sept. 27.)