Why Forgiveness in Relationships Fails: What 4 Films Reveal About Reheating Old Sins
Four films expose why saying “I forgive you” doesn’t mean letting go. Discover the toxic relationship patterns hidden in breakfast conversations and beyond.
“Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.” Marlene Dietrich dropped this wisdom and walked away, presumably to smoke a cigarette at a geometrically perfect angle. But here’s what makes the quote cinematically explosive: it’s not about forgiveness. It’s about the performance of forgiveness, the difference between saying you’ve let something go and actually opening your fist. And cinema, that great lie detector, has been catching people in this exact act since cameras learned to hold on faces long enough to watch them crack.
The breakfast metaphor is perfect because breakfast is ritual, mundane, repeated. You can hide rage in the scrambling of eggs. You can weaponize orange juice. The reheating isn’t loud—it’s not the plate smashed against the wall. It’s the slight pause before answering a question. The too-careful arrangement of butter on toast. The way someone says “good morning” like they’re reading it off a cue card. Let’s watch four films catch people in this lie, each in a completely different key.
The Forensic Evidence of Breakfast
Blue Valentine (2010) shoots breakfast like a crime scene investigation, and Derek Cianfrance is the detective who won’t look away. But everyone misreads this film as a tragedy about divorce. Look closer. This is a documentary about what happens when you say you’ve forgiven someone but your body hasn’t gotten the memo.
There’s a scene midway through where Dean makes Cindy breakfast in bed—scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, the whole performance of domestic devotion. Ryan Gosling plays it with desperate brightness, like if he can just nail the choreography of love, the feeling will follow. Michelle Williams takes the tray and you watch her face do something devastating: she says thank you. Her mouth smiles. But her eyes are conducting a completely different transaction. She’s calculating the cost of this gesture, adding it to a ledger Dean doesn’t know exists. The forgiveness she offered when she married him—for his lack of ambition, his contentment with simple pleasures, his insistence on staying exactly who he is—that forgiveness has compound interest. Every kind gesture he makes is now evidence of how he doesn’t understand that kindness isn’t enough.
Cianfrance shoots this in available light, all washed-out blues and grays, the opposite of romantic warmth. He’s not interested in confrontation. He’s interested in erosion. The camera holds on her face for probably fifteen seconds after he leaves the room—just Williams, alone, staring at scrambled eggs that are probably getting cold. That’s the shot. That’s the whole movie. She’s already convicted him. The appeals process is a formality.
Here’s the thing nobody talks about: Dean hasn’t done anything new. That’s the trap. The sins she’s reheating aren’t fresh offenses. They’re original features she thought she could accept. But forgiveness without acceptance isn’t forgiveness—it’s a suspended sentence. And every breakfast is parole review.
When Grudges Become Content
Turn the dial to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and you get something stranger. George and Martha aren’t reheating sins. They’ve built an entire theatrical production out of them, complete with recurring characters and improvised new material. Mike Nichols adapted Edward Albee’s play but he’s not really interested in theater. He’s interested in what happens when the performance of resentment becomes the relationship itself.
Everyone knows the basic facts: older academic couple, brutal verbal combat, mysterious imaginary son. But the conventional reading—that they’re torturing each other—misses what’s actually happening. Watch the scene where Martha tells their young guests about their “son” and George interrupts with increasingly baroque contradictions. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton aren’t playing anger. They’re playing jazz musicians who’ve perfected this particular number through thousands of performances. When Burton finally “kills” the imaginary son at dawn, Taylor’s reaction isn’t devastation. It’s recognition. He’s changed the setlist without asking.
The imaginary child is the ultimate reheated sin—we never learn what wound created him, but George and Martha have maintained this fantasy for decades as a kind of shared performance art. Every party becomes opening night. Every new couple becomes their audience. They’ve discovered something most relationships never figure out: perpetual unforgiveness can be a collaborative project. The ritual has replaced the relationship. They’re not stuck in resentment—they’ve turned resentment into their primary form of intimacy.
Nichols shoots their final scene in harsh morning light that makes them look exhausted and old and somehow peaceful. The sin-reheating isn’t pathological anymore. It’s vocational. This is their work. This is what they do together. It’s the darkest possible inversion of Dietrich’s wisdom: what if you discover that you both prefer the wrestling to the peace?
The Poison Is the Partnership
Phantom Thread (2017) shouldn’t work as an illustration of this quote. Alma literally poisons Reynolds with mushrooms—twice. She’s not reheating old sins, she’s actively committing new ones. But Paul Thomas Anderson understands something twisted and true about forgiveness that most filmmakers won’t touch: sometimes the only way to forgive someone for being unbearable is to find a way to make them bearable, even if the method is insane.
Reynolds Woodcock is a tyrannical genius who treats Alma like furniture that talks. She forgives his cruelty, his dismissiveness, his mother obsession, his need to control every stitch and thread and moment. But here’s Anderson’s revelation: she forgives by not letting it go. She forgives by weaponizing the one thing that breaks his control—illness. When he’s weak, when he needs her, he becomes the man she can love. The poison mushrooms aren’t revenge. They’re a reset button. And they both know it.
The film’s most disturbing scene comes at the end. They’re at breakfast. Alma is cooking. Reynolds sits at the table in perfect morning light—Anderson shoots him like a classical painting, all muted greens and soft focus. Then we cut to the pan. Mushrooms. Cut back to Reynolds. He sees them. We know he sees them because Daniel Day-Lewis does this tiny thing with his eyebrows, almost imperceptible, a flicker of recognition. Cut to Alma. She knows he knows. They lock eyes. And then—this is the crucial moment—he smiles. Not a grimace. A smile. He picks up his fork. He chooses to eat them.
This is forgiveness as mutual assured destruction. She’s not secretly poisoning him anymore. He’s consenting to be poisoned. They’ve created a system where their equilibrium requires periodic collapse and reconstruction. It’s the opposite of not reheating sins—it’s consciously recreating the original sin, together, as a shared ritual. Most relationships end when you can’t forgive. Theirs works because they’ve turned unforgiveness into choreography.
What These Characters Actually Figured Out:
The traditional forgiveness model assumes you let go and move forward. But these films reveal three alternative paths that most people won’t admit exist:
- You forgive but keep receipts, and the receipts become the relationship (Blue Valentine)
- You turn your grievances into theater, and the performance becomes more real than the marriage (Virginia Woolf)
- You find a pattern where both of you can bear the unbearable by ritualizing the damage (Phantom Thread)
None of these are healthy. All of them are recognizable. That’s what makes them cinematically true.
The Infinite Breakfast Paradox
Palm Springs (2020) seems like a tonal curveball—a goofy Groundhog Day comedy about a wedding in the desert. But it’s actually the most philosophically rigorous treatment of Dietrich’s wisdom on this list. When you’re trapped in an infinite time loop, every conversation is potentially reheated. Every mistake can be weaponized forever. The conditions are perfect for eternal grudge-holding. And yet.
Nyles has been stuck in November 9th for decades, maybe centuries—the film never specifies. He knows everything about everyone at this wedding. He knows the groom slept with Sarah the night before. He knows the best man is embezzling. He knows which guests are cheating, lying, hiding. He’s accumulated a database of sins that could fuel breakfast arguments for a lifetime. But when Sarah discovers he knew about her infidelity and never mentioned it, she’s stunned. Not because he used it against her. Because he genuinely didn’t care.
Director Max Barbakos structures the film so that Sarah’s realization lands about twenty minutes before the ending, and what follows is crucial. They’re lying in sleeping bags under the stars—Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti shot from above, just two tiny figures against the desert. Sarah asks him why he never said anything. He says, “It doesn’t matter.” And you can hear that he means it. In a scenario specifically designed to make scorekeeping infinite, he chose the harder path: actually letting things go.
The film’s climax isn’t the escape from the loop—it’s the decision to attempt escape. Sarah’s figured out the physics. They can leave together. But leaving means consequences matter again. Past actions have weight. The sins can’t be reset every morning. Nyles has to choose whether he wants a future where forgiveness is permanent or a present where forgiveness doesn’t need to be. He chooses the future. The risk of everything mattering beats the safety of nothing counting.
Here’s the paradox that makes this connection work: the time loop should teach you that nothing matters. Instead, it teaches Nyles that choosing to forgive when you could choose otherwise is what makes anything matter. Dietrich’s wisdom isn’t about memory loss. It’s about deciding that today’s version of someone isn’t responsible for yesterday’s version. Even when you remember. Especially when you remember.
The camera catches lies that dialogue can’t hide. You can script the words “I forgive you,” but you can’t script the micro-expression that flickers across Michelle Williams’s face when Ryan Gosling brings her breakfast in bed. You can’t script the way Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have turned their imaginary child into performance art. You can’t script Daniel Day-Lewis choosing to eat poisoned mushrooms with full knowledge of what they’ll do to him. You can’t script Andy Samberg deciding that escape is worth the risk of permanent consequences.
Dietrich’s quote sounds like relationship advice, but it’s really about the difference between absolution and scorekeeping in absolution’s clothing. The breakfast metaphor works because breakfast is the first negotiation of the day, the moment when you decide whether today carries yesterday’s weight. It’s why the reheating is so insidious—it’s not loud. It’s not the plate against the wall. It’s the slight hesitation before the first bite. The too-careful passing of the salt. The way someone says “thank you” like they’re testifying under oath.
These four films understand that forgiveness is a verb in continuous tense, not a past event. The hard part isn’t the initial gesture—it’s keeping it forgiven. Not preserving it in amber as evidence. Not maintaining it on life support until you need leverage. The choice to actually clear the table and start fresh doesn’t come naturally. It’s a decision you make every morning, at breakfast, when the old sins are sitting right there in the refrigerator, perfectly preserved, ready to be reheated at a moment’s notice. Cinema’s great gift is showing us people in the act of making that choice—or refusing to make it—when they think no one’s watching. But the camera’s watching. And it doesn’t blink.