Married Life (PG-13) **½ | Trust them to tell you a pack of lies
Posted on Fri, Mar. 28, 2008
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ
JOSEPH LEDERER / SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Rachel McAdams, Chris Cooper, center, and Pierce Brosnan tell stories in Married Life.
This review previously was published during the Miami International Film Festival.
Befitting a story about marriage, adultery and murder, all the characters in Married Life are constantly lying to each other. Sometimes they even lie to the audience.
Harry (Chris Cooper), a straight-arrow businessman whos been having an affair with the much-younger Kay (Rachel McAdams), can't bring himself to tell his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) he wants a divorce, so he plots to murder her instead. Harry's best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan), a suave playboy who knows about the affair, can't bring himself to tell his pal that he, too, has fallen for Kay.
And Pat and Kay have secrets of their own, but a big part of the fun in writer-director Ira Sachs comic melodrama, which is based on John Bingham's novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, is finding out for yourself what is really going on inside the characters' heads.
The movie, which is set in 1949, can't make up its mind about what it wants to be, jumping from noir to comedy to melodrama and back again. But its attitudes and cynicism are definitely contemporary. Married Life argues that people can't be trusted, least of all the ones who love you, because they don't trust you enough to be upfront about things.
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams, David Wenham
Director: Ira Sachs
Screenwriters: Ira Sachs, Oren Moverman
Producers: Sidney Kimmel, Jawal Nga, Steve Golin
A Sony Pictures Classics release. Running time: 90 minutes. In Miami-Dade: South Beach; in Broward: Sunrise 11; in Palm Beach: Shadowood, Delray.
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