Movie review: Married Life

Infidelity games. No rules.

by John P. Meyer

In the world of Ira Sachs' marvelously elegant and atmospheric Married Life, guys wear fedoras and drive massive, curvy Detroit-built cars. Women wear nylon stockings with seams down the back. It's late 1940's America, and businessmen are busy doing business (which includes martini dinners in swank lounges with clients and associates), and some of them even find time for monkey business with platinum blonde war widows.

Take Harry Allen (Chris Cooper), for instance. Harry's doing quite well in both the sorts of business just mentioned. He's got a big house, a loving wife (Patricia Clarkson, as Pat), a downtown office, a secretary and a mistress (in the person of Rachel McAdams, as Kay). Furthermore, he's got a good and trusted friend in Richard Langley (Pierce Brosnan, looking more than comfortable in a sophisticated postwar milieu that Cary Grant might have inhabited in an earlier filmmaking era). But even with all this going for him, Harry's got a problem:

See, he's in love with Kay. And who can blame him, for Kay is sexy and demure and mysterious and knows how to pierce a fellow with a sidelong glance. But Harry also cares (very much) for Pat, and he doesn't want to put her through the pain of a divorce. So - being the gentleman that he is - Harry decides to simply kill her instead. What a guy, eh?

Harry's got another problem: he thinks it's a good idea to introduce his suave, single, debonair buddy with a history of womanizing - Richard - to his gorgeous young girlfriend - Kay - so that Richard can keep Kay occupied - platonically - on occasions when he (Harry) isn't around to entertain her. Man, that's asking a lot of a friendship, I'm just sayin'.

To top it off, Richard is good friends with Pat, and feels really crappy about the way Harry is treating her. He thinks Richard is crazy, in short, to be screwing up his marvelously successful marriage by fooling around with Kay. (Even though Kay is, admittedly, the hottest platinum blonde nylon-wearing Kim-Novak-in- Vertigo-lookalike war widow ever.)

Sure enough, after an instance or two of trying to remain above-board friendly, a thoroughly-smitten Richard throws caution to the wind and turns the charm lever on "full." And of course Richard (Pierce) is one of the most charming guys since - well - Cary Grant, while Harry (Mr. Cooper) has more of that comforting father figure vibe going for him. In other words, the refocusing of Kay's affections is a fait accompli.

Meanwhile, back at the murder plot, Harry obtains a photographic chemical that his toxicology research indicates will deliver a swift and relatively painless death to Pat; he intends to introduce it into the headache medication which she imbibes on a regular basis; further, he intends to be well away from the house and in the presence of witnesses when the imbibement (and resulting death) actually occurs. Actor Chris Cooper is well-practiced at conveying sub-surface emotional trauma (reference his roles in Breach, The Bourne Supremacy, American Beauty and a host of others) and he exercises that talent to its fullest during these sequences.

Pat - it turns out - might not be as broken up to discover Harry's extramarital shenanigans as he thinks she would, because Pat herself has some subterranean stuff of her own going on. When Richard stumbles upon Pat in flagrante delicto, he's put in the doubly-uncomfortable position of acting as a secret-keeping confidante to her as well as Harry. If you count his own dalliance with Kay (his best friend's girlfriend), this makes him sort of a triple agent.

It's amusing to hear Harry trot out the same well-practiced line for use on both Kay (in order to aid in his seduction of her) and Pat (in order to soothe her conscience over his discovery of her own indiscretion). Starting out as it does with something to the effect of "You're a bigger person than that...", it does have potential for a range of applications.

To its credit, Ira Sachs' romantic period piece of a film never settles into a comfortable formula - we can't tell for a long time whether it's going to be a light-hearted comedy, a murder-plot-gone-wrong noir thriller or a twisted-ending mystery. When it turns out to be none of these (while exhibiting traits of them all), we are left instead with a reflective, mildly melancholic slice of worldly-wise life whose message about the vagaries and resiliency of relationships rings true and timeless.

THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY: "Men in my life don't seem to live very long." - Kay to Richard

WAGES OF SIN?: "Sir? You do need to pay." - clerk at the photographic supply store, to Harry

WHAT ABOUT PLASTICS?: "Pharmaceuticals - that's the future." - Harry