Better Dead Than Wed

It cad to be you: Pierce Brosnan in Married Life.

How to murder one’s spouse becomes the topic of rather civilized discourse in Married Life.
(Sony Classics; 91 minutes; PG-13; 2008), a quirky dark comedy set in
1949 in what looks like a verdant New England-ish climate. 

Harry (Chris Cooper), a bespectacled
stockbroker, wants to split from his 40-ish, still-vivacious wife Pat
(Patricia Clarkson) because he has fallen in love with the younger Kay
(Rachel McAdams), a platinum blond war widow. An old-school romantic,
Harry tells his childhood pal, swinging single Richard (ex-007 Pierce
Brosnan, in sly rogue mode), that he has been chafing over the comments
made by modern-woman prototype Pat that “love is sex; the rest is
affection and companionship.” (“We all have to put up with something,
Harry,” Richard deadpans. “We can’t have everything.”) 

When Richard meets Kay, however, he
likewise becomes smitten and initiates an amorous pursuit of this
alluring bombshell. But Richard is unaware that Harry has investigated
tomes devoted to toxicology, in search of an untraceable poison that he
can lace into the bicarbonate Pat takes for her delicate tummy. 

Director Ira Sachs co-wrote with Oren Moverman a script adapted from ex-secret agent-turned-author John Bingham’s Five Roundabouts to Heaven (Bingham was reportedly an influence on John Le Carre’s spy novels), yet Married Life comes across as too genteel regarding its potential film noir trimmings. This isn’t The Postman Always Rings Twice
by a long shot, as Sachs always confounds a viewer’s expectations. Kay
isn’t a golddigger looking for monied happiness as a kept woman, nor is
Richard a horny-at-all-costs interloper willing to risk his longtime
friendship with Harry. 

And Harry’s single-minded desire to bump off a sensual delight like Pat is surely this movie’s biggest joke, like in 1967’s A Guide for the Married Man
when Walter Matthau attempts to fool around even while married to hotsy
Inger Stevens. Harry is enough of a narcissistic ass to claim that
she’s better off dead and buried rather than being divorced and living
without him, although a key revelation at the midway point presents Pat
from a new perspective.

Sidestepping the noir components, Sachs
seems to be tapping into a postwar domestic ennui, exemplified by the
disfranchised male leads in 1950s films such as Tom Ewell pining for
Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch and Gregory Peck’s Madison Avenue exec from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
The opening credits feature animated advertisement clip art from the
era describing suburban lifestyles, as Doris Day warbles “I Can’t Give
You Anything But Love” on the soundtrack. 

In his quest for period detail, however,
Sachs fields two whoppers in one scene at a bijou: Richard puffs away
on a cigarette—instead of being rousted by an usher and sent to the
lobby—while watching the James Mason-Ava Gardner Technicolor fantasy
romance Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a 1951 release! Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if Sachs said to hell with accuracy, all the better to subtly connect Pandora with his own movie’s theme regarding women and their spellbinding control over the males in their orbits.

Married Life’s carefully
constructed calibrations occasionally mute its sting—even an oddball
morality play like this needs some breathing room—yet Sachs mines a
wealth of sharp observations from his ensemble. Note the scene in which
Harry and Pat’s married daughter (Erin Boyes) tersely stirs a teaspoon
as her hubby, a pipe-smoking shrink (David Richmond-Peck), pontificates
at a get-together; she’s silently suffering in suburbia. 

Patricia Clarkson’s sexy vibrance as Pat
triumphs over her underwritten role, while Rachel McAdams fleshes out
Kay’s humanity even as she physically channels the overripe appeal of
late-1940s Hollywood goddesses. Chris Cooper’s hangdog Harry garners
some sweaty sympathy, especially during the funny-scary vignette when
he tries to overstuff Pat with breakfast in bed so that she’ll be
quickly forced to reach for her digestive powder. The sequence is
amusingly reminiscent of the spiked milk passage in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). 

And while Pierce Brosnan’s ego was
bruised when he was booted from the Bond franchise, he has more room to
roam in drily sophisticated entries like Married Life, where he
gets to utter droll dialogue like “When it comes to the opposite sex,
men are selfish. {Two-beat pause.} I’m no exception.” Lucky him.