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MARRIED LIFE
Directed by Ira Sachs
Produced by Sidney Kimmel, Jawal Nga, Steve Golin & Ira Sachs
Written by Sachs & Oren Moverman, based on the book Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham
Director of Photography, Peter Deming
Edited by Affonse Goncalves
Music by Dickon Hinchliffe
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
USA/Canada. 90 min. Rated PG-13
With Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams & David Wenham
Special Features: Commentary by Ira Sachs. Three alternate endings. Trailers

This is the film Woody Allen would kill to make—an effortless, cohesive, and cutting look on commitment, love, and marital maneuvers. It parallels not just one of his darker films, Crimes and Misdemeanors, but he would be right at home in the WASPy milieu.

The film’s quartet could be neighbors to the quick-witted social climbers in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1949 A Letter to Three Wives, set in the same time period. At a martini lunch, big shot Harry Allen announces to his childhood friend and ladies’ man Richard that he’s leaving his wife, Pat (the unsettling serene Patricia Clarkson) because he’s finally found true happiness with a younger woman, Kay. He confides that for his wife, love is just sex; the rest, as she casually says to Harry in a flashback, is affection and companionship. But it doesn’t hurt that his newfound love is played by a va-va-va-voom Rachel McAdams with a bleached Marilyn bob. (Keira Knightly is not the only one who can wear emerald green to dynamite effect.) Since Kay lives by herself in the middle of nowhere, would Richard mind paying her a visit and bringing her some books, asks Harry. Gladly, Richard tells his friend; to steal Kay away from Harry, he says to the audience in his voice-over.

His persistent narration may be the only overwritten aspect to the lively script. The acting is so strong that you have to wonder if some of the mystery has been removed. But even so, the whiplash twists and turns are all dependent on the smoothness and subtly of the decorous characters.

However, to make the unspoken competition between alpha-males Harry and Richard work, Chris Cooper’s Harry needs the sort of narcissistic pride or smugness that would preclude any thoughts of his friend’s betrayal. With his baggy and beady eyes, Cooper registers as more of a sad sack than master of the universe. As Richard, Pierce Brosnan looks like he could trounce Harry with a flick of the wrist. And being so debonair, you have to wonder why Richard would begrudge Harry’s hooking up with Kay. Reversing the casting of Cooper and Brosnan would play more unpredictably, at least in my mind. This is not to criticize Cooper’s performance—he’s one of the few guy guys who can be vulnerable with ease—only that the competition between the two men would have been more heightened.

Brosnan, by the way, should be happy to have left the bonds of being Bond if he continues picking roles this wisely. He offers a case study in self-assurance in a scene where Richard knows more information than the other characters in the room. While he voices concern and understanding, his body language reveals something else; legs crossed, holding a cigarette casually in the air, he’s all self-confidence, but only he and the audience knows it.

But what’s more noteworthy is the light and satiric touch by director Ira Sachs. Just about the only connection to this film and his last, Forty Shades of Blue, is the characters’ fondness for the blues. Gone are the long, drawn-out takes with little dialogue, and an ambiguous ending. Here, all the uncertainty lies within the characters’ machinations.
March 7, 2008

DVD Extras: Two of the three alternate endings offer such a radical change of tone from Sachs’s final cut that they seem like outtakes from a different, more morose movie. The comparisons between the various conclusions fascinatingly reveal the impact of editing—and at least in this instance, the power of test screenings. The first alternate ending, at nearly 10 minutes, departs the most, but, according to Sachs, is more faithful to the film’s pulpy source. Five Roundabouts to Heaven’s author, John Bingham, was an MI5 agent and mentor to John le Carré—which explains the subterfuge among the main characters. Besides the usual production facts and figures, Sachs also divulges in his commentary the movies that influenced Married Life—not surprisingly, the glamorous ’40s films starring Crawford and Davis. (And maybe you already caught the Kiss Me Deadly- or La Notte-inspired shot. I didn’t.) Kent Turner
August 29, 2008