Married Life

My, but that's… really boring

2007

Review: April 25, 2008

Director: Ira Sachs

Starring: Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams

No, save it for a movie where something happens.

THE SETUP:

Guy is having an affair, but his wife loves him so much, he begins to think it might be better to kill her than break her heart.

DISCUSSION:

This was a disappointment. I had read the reviews that described it as fairly mediocre, but they also described it as "Hitchcockian" [God, if only], and the premise sounded fairly intriguing, and besides… subtle movies are often totally misinterpreted by our nation's leading professional critics. So I, fool that I am, ended up in the theater, sitting through this exercise in mediocrity.

We begin promisingly with some very nice credits with nicely-arranged 50s-era illustrations of domestic life. Then we meet Chris Cooper as Harry, confessing to his best buddy, Pierce Brosnan as Rich, that he's having an affair with Rachel McAdams as Kay, and can't bear to tell his wife, Patricia Clarkson as Pat. Forget all those names yet? Then he introduces Kay to Rich, and we can tell that Rich covets her. Cooper looks pretty good, but he's so much older than Kay that we have to start to wonder about Kay's Daddy issues.

Meanwhile, we've had a flashback to Pat telling Harry that love is really just sex, which Harry disagrees with. It seems that their marriage has gone cold, and at one point Pat says she knows he doesn't love her, then nearly has a heart attack for crying. Through some occurrence or whatnot, it occurs to Harry that, since Pat loves him so much, and would be so destroyed by his leaving her, it would be better to kill her and put her out of her misery. However, unbeknownst to him, Rich has his sights set of betraying his best friend and stealing Kay out from under him. Rich, who narrates the film, looks Kay over and says "When it comes to the opposite sex, most men are selfish. I'm… no exception." Rich starts taking Kay out to extravagant evenings of food, drinking and dancing, and starts to drive a wedge between her and Harry. Thanks, friend!

I can't even bother to reveal spoilers, because I don't care enough. Usually I go into spoilers because I'm interested in discussing the end of the movie. Not here. I will say that I thought the murder thing would occupy the first third of the movie… not the whole movie. In fact, I thought the whole thing would develop more than it did. I was enjoying the first half, it's reasonably clever, all the performances are very good, it's well-written… and then you start to think: Shouldn't this be going somewhere? Shouldn't this story be much further along by now? And then you start to realize that almost nothing is going to happen, and by the end… even less happens than you might have expected. And I don't mean "nothing happens" in Anonioni sense, I mean "nothing happens" in the "No, really, NOTHING HAPPENS" sense.

Alas, I can't bother myself to write about this movie any more. This is a good thing if you need to take your 80-year-old grandmother to a movie. Other than that, it should have gone straight to Lifetime. It's too bad, because I like all these actors and they all turn in very good performances but, Christ, what a snore.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

I would think twice about that, it's seriously underwhelming.