Married Life

Married Life opens with the voice of Pierce Brosnan, presumably cast for his haughty British accent, recounting a well-worn tale. A man who does not believe in love comes face-to-face with his lurking inner romantic upon being introduced to his best friend’s girl. How inconvenient.
Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) is in love with his girlfriend Kay (played by the lovely but stiff Rachel McAdams) but unfortunately there is the usual snag: Harry is still married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson). Harry cares too much about Pat to leave her with nothing, so Harry decides that the only way all parties can escape the situation unscathed is if Pat dies—“sweet release”, he calls it, and basically a mercy killing for the woman who had taken such good care of him, so she would not have to see all her hard work profit another woman.

But wait, this potentially dark plot turns sunny: as luck would have it, Pat is having an affair as well, which Richard (Brosnan) finds out when he shows up unexpected at the Allen’s summer house. Like her husband, Pat is also in love with her paramour, but cares too much about Henry to leave him sad and alone.
Inevitably, the dashing Brosnan sweeps Kay off her feet. Henry realizes that his wife is all he has in this life and arrives home just in time to save her from imminent death. The film ends with a shot on a scene of couples laughing and playing charades. Brosnan’s voice-over proclaims the cliché moral that “no one really knows what goes on in the mind of the one who sleeps next to you”. This also turns out to be a variation on the films tagline. This plot is set to an over-wrought 1940s façade is almost as contrived as Brosnan’s narration.
Brimming with classic misadventure and misunderstanding, Married Life attempts to uncover the many shades of gray in forties-era life. In a time of sexual and social pretense and strict mores, the unusually virile Pat sums up love in one word: “sex”. Her summation comes to us like a footnote to the Kinsey report, illustrating the underlying sexuality in a supposed time of repression.
But despite its ambitions, the film achieves little. Married Life is a Katharine Hepburn film without the grace. When Rachel McAdams dons platinum locks and fire hydrant red lipstick to mimic the sirens of 1940s films, we are hardly convinced. Brosnan may be a good Bond, but he is a poor Cary Grant. Director and co-writer Ira Sachs attempts to find modern humor in the over-the-top 1940s framework. Brosnan’s disembodied voice remarks upon a lame pick-up line he used on Kay—“Can I have your cigarette…because it touched your lips”. A messy scene tracks Henry rushing home to stop his wife from taking poisoned indigestion medication only to be pulled over by a group of glib cops (due to a faulty tail light)!
But, like the jokes, the film falls short. Mindless and easy, Married Life is nothing special. If you want snappy dialogue and men in hats, you would be well advised to rent a film that was actually made in the forties.