Married Life 2007

Ira Sachs' slyly ironic film noir relocates British crime novelist John Bingham's Five Roundabouts to Heaven to the Pacific Northwest in the late 40s. Staunchly respectable Harry (Chris Cooper), married to warm and funny Pat (Patricia Clarkson), has been swept off his perch by the much younger Kay (Rachel McAdams). The unworldly Harry confesses to his bachelor friend (Pierce Brosnan), who takes an instant fancy to the luscious young mistress himself. Harry, meanwhile, in order to spare Pat the pain of desertion, has made a solemn decision: as humanely as possible, he will murder her. The piquancy of the film's comic/tragic tone is derived from the fact that no one in it ever knows as much about any of their intimate friends or lovers as we do. There's refined cinematic pleasure here in 40s style and in the flair of the performances, but it is our anxiety for the Patricia Clarkson character that gives this brainy film its heart. — BG

"The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad - they're all splendidly of a piece. The movie is a goof on Hitchcock and Sirk - a period (late forties) soap opera with nasty sexual undertones and the omnipresent threat of murder. The narrator, a Lord of Misrule, is Pierce Brosnan, who can play a too-handsome cad and convincingly parody one - everything rolls off him. But his best friend, the protagonist, is played by Chris Cooper, off whom nothing rolls: Sour, saggy, quivering with repressed longing, always a step away from implosion, Cooper straddles the comedy-melodrama border and keeps you both giggly and tense." — David Edelstein, New York