Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride
Patricia Vidal

Married Life
Directed by Ira Sachs

What struck me most about Ira Sachs’ Married Life was the actors. The film is basically a four character piece approximating the style of 40’s noir, often threatening to bring forth modern notions, but then choosing not to, limiting just how interesting the experience will be. Chris Cooper is sublime, as always. He just isn’t capable of walking through a film. Patricia Clarkson has become a true master of the camera. You can actually see her using the angles and light with her own instincts sometimes. Rachel McAdams finds yet another character to play who is completely different than what she has done before.

But it is Pierce Brosnan who really struck me in the film. He is finally aging into the time where he can be a better looking Fred MacMurray, circa the Wilder period. He has been such a good looking guy that he has never quite looked relaxed on the big screen. But here, really for the first time, he does. (The Matador is a good performance, but a self-parody, which is easier.) It is easier to imagine that he will have a significant third act in movies now.

The movie really isn’t bad. The muted response here is probably because critics were hoping for something as challenging as Sachs’ 40 Shades Of Blue. It’s not. Also working this angle at the festival is Francois Ozon’s Angel, which is so close to the vest that audiences are afraid to laugh through much of the film’s dry satire of Southern Gothic films. The lead character, Angel, clearly is a Barbara Cartland type who really thinks she is Scarlett O’Hara. In Married Life, you keep waiting for the moment that McA’s character expresses that she really wants a guy who wants her sex and not just her nursing… something that is expressed, again relatively subtly, by Clarkson’s character.

It’s funny. Sachs’ movie is daring mostly in that it argues that romanticism is a failed idea. Explosive sexual chemistry overwhelms the search for romantic love for all but one character in the film. And sexual deceit is what wins the day, without judgment. Interesting… but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

- David Poland