| MARRIED LIFE |
 2008 - USADirector: Ira Sachs
- Reviewed by Vickie
Set in 1949, the film follows the lives of four people struggling somehow with their romantic relationships. There’s Harry (Chris Cooper), a staid and unhappily married man; his wife, Pat (Patricia Clarkson), whose biggest flaw in the eyes of her husband is her insatiable sexual appetite and her inability to separate sex from love; Harry’s wide-eyed mistress, Kay (Rachel McAdams), who’s sweetness and light and inexplicably involved with Harry—a man old enough to be her father; and Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s best pal, who’s smitten with Kay the minute he lays eyes on her, and just as confounded as the audience as to what she sees in a guy as dull and leathery as Harry. Problems arise... or, rather, escalate... when Harry decides he wants to leave Pat and begin a new life with Kay. For starters, Richard kind of wants Kay for himself, so he’s torn between supporting his best pal and getting the girl. But then Harry starts to worry that Pat will fall apart if he were to divorce her, so—after a nice chat with a plot device... I mean, a hitchhiker... he picks up one dark night—he comes up with what he truly believes is a much kinder, gentler solution: kill Pat! On the surface, the movie has all the makings for some kind of wonderful, twisted, borderline Hitchcockian thriller. But it never moves past that surface and what could be a smart, beguiling tale instead remains just a flat, tepid character study where people do stupid things for stupid reasons and situations are resolved in unsatisfying, kind of stupid ways. It doesn’t really help that Cooper, whose character is meant to be driving the action, is really uninteresting and unconvincing... with a slightly sinister undercurrent. I don’t know why, but I kept expecting Harry to snap and go postal. I didn’t buy Cooper as a romantic lead at all, and there was exactly zero chemistry between him and McAdams, who looked more like his teenaged daughter than the woman he’s sleeping with on the sly. (Ew.) Nevermind her horrifying blonde wig. I kept waiting for her to be given more to do or for her character to be given more depth, but no. Patricia Clarkson was good, as always, but I think perhaps Sachs’ direction might have pushed her performance to the edge of camp at times. And Brosnan phones in a standard-issue Pierce Brosnan performance: suave, kind of funny, somewhat heroic but flawed. Somewhere underneath all the mediocrity, it feels like there’s meant to be a moral to this bland story. Something like “love conquers all” or “it’s okay to settle” or “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or “you can’t always get what you want, but you can get what you need.” I dunno, given the film’s conclusion and my own feelings exiting the theater, I’m inclined to think it’s more along the lines of “no one ever died of boredom.” |
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Despite its rather impressive cast, this curious little drama from
director Ira Sachs is decidedly meh all around.
