"A funny story, in its way, about a man who wanted to poison his wife and found he'd be lost without her." With these words, Richard (Pierce Brosnan) sums up the events of Ira Sachs's second film. Note the careful qualification "in its way," which already suggests that perhaps Married Life isn't all that funny, and maybe not much of a story, either. In fact, it's the first film at this year's New York Film Festival that I wish I had walked out of.
In the beginning scenes, Married Life poses as a sleek and breezy comedy of manners. It's 1947, and Harry (a bespectacled Chris Cooper) confides in his friend Richard that he's planning to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) for his much younger girlfriend Kay (Rachel McAdams). But Richard, an eternal bachelor who believes marriage is a kind of disease, is also attracted to Kay -- and Pat has secrets of her own.
Bathed in the golden light that has come to indicate the period in the movies, Married Life is elegantly designed, but the handsome sheen of the great forties comedies it would like to emulate doesn't come to life without the snap of crisp dialogue and tight storytelling. You know you're in trouble if the wallpaper is more exciting than anything that happens in front of it. Airless scenes told with a heavy hand drag on and on until you wish somebody would finally down that poison.
