While the movie starts as a cute romantic musical with nostalgic kiwi songs, it then veers into an unearned tragic twist. The characters weren't developed enough beyond 'cute working class guy meets cute country girl' to sell the total failure to communicate that causes it all.
I can kind of imagine that someone might be so twisted up by shame that they couldn't say anything, but not this character. It came across as ridiculous that he couldn't reveal a relatively minor secret (well in the past by the climax) to save his marriage.
There's also a fairly ambiguous section where the guy acts like a student lad playing in a band, ignoring his wife, which obviously upsets her, but why does he do this? How are they living if he is not working? Why doesn't she complain? This is where being a musical actually becomes a problem, a few lines from a song jammed in doesn't really tell you what the characters are feeling in enough detail.
I can kind of imagine that someone might be so twisted up by shame that they couldn't say anything, but not this character. It came across as ridiculous that he couldn't reveal a relatively minor secret (well in the past by the climax) to save his marriage.
There's also a fairly ambiguous section where the guy acts like a student lad playing in a band, ignoring his wife, which obviously upsets her, but why does he do this? How are they living if he is not working? Why doesn't she complain? This is where being a musical actually becomes a problem, a few lines from a song jammed in doesn't really tell you what the characters are feeling in enough detail.