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Movie Review: Married Life
by Bill Wine
A husband plots the poisoning death of his wife rather than put her through the humiliation of divorce.
RATING: PG-13
GENRE: Drama
RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2008
RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes
VIOLENCE FACTOR: A painless death is planned, but there is no actual violence.
BAD WORDS: None
RACY?: The plot involves adultery, but there's nothing explicit.
OTHER THINGS TO KNOW: There is constant cigarette smoking and extensive drinking, all era-appropriate (1949).
GRANDS:
CRITIQUE:
The one charm of marriage, wrote Oscar Wilde, is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
And he hadn't even seen Married Life.
This period dramedy about loyalty and infidelity is a character-driven love quadrangle set in the prosperous postwar America of 1949. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson are a childless married couple who still love each other but are no longer in love. Cooper loves a much-younger World War II widow, Rachel McAdams, with whom he hopes to build a life. But how can he end his marriage without being cruel?
He confesses his dilemma to his best friend, commitment-phobic bachelor Pierce Brosnan, and introduces his young soulmate to her. As soon as the womanizing Pierce lays eyes on McAdams, he falls for her as well.
As if the romantic geometry weren't complicated enough, Cooper convinces himself that the most humane thing he can do is poison his wife so that she will die painlessly in her sleep and be spared the pain and humiliation of a divorce.
Director and co-writer Ira Sachs, transplanting the British source novel to an unnamed American city, shifts tones like an acrobat testing out genre trampolines, bouncing from drama to comedy to melodrama to thriller, to say nothing of the mystery — of wedded bliss. The finely-tuned quartet of a cast holds our interest, and Sachs' narrative has a few tangy twists and turns that brings a light touch to dark material.
Married Life will remind grandparents of, and infotain older grandchildren about an earlier era, when cigarettes seemed to be everywhere and divorces nowhere at all. This quietly controlled diversion brings something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue to its wedding of genres.
GP Rating System:
Three Grands = Bravo, don't miss it.
Two Grands = Good enough, don't dismiss it.
One Grand = Okay, even if we dis it.
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