Married Life

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

A combination of murder thriller and screwball farce is also a gently melancholy rumination on the nature of love.

Harry Allen (Cooper) has a problem. He's in love with the gorgeous blonde widow Kay Allen (McAdams) but he can't bear the thought of betraying his wife, Pat (Clarkson). So he decides to kill Pat, just to be kind.

He tells his best mate Richard (Brosnan). Now Richard has a problem. But it's nothing compared with the problem he will have when he meets Kay.

Working from a script he co-wrote with Oren Moverman (who penned the Bob Dylan fantasia

I'm Not There

), director Sachs has pulled off that most difficult of cinematic conjuring tricks: he's made a light, dark tragi-comedy. A romantic melodrama that juggles elements of Hitchcockian murder thriller and screwball farce, it is also - and importantly - a slightly melancholy but finally hopeful rumination on the nature of love.

That may sound like a big load for one film, but Sachs carries it lightly. What's best about

Married Life

, which he adapted from a little-known pulp-fiction thriller, is that you never know what's going to happen - in terms of style or substance. And it's an indication of its lightness of touch that in a film with betrayal, deceit, even murder on its mind, there is no villain: Sachs has too much affection for all his characters' simple humanity to fall for that old line.

The film is set in 1949 (when everyone smoked and cigarettes didn't have filter tips) and Sachs' style references the movies of the time in more than its production design: when Harry's secretary passes him the phone to take a call that he's not expecting, the pause is outrageously long by modern standards. But for all its slightly camp stylistic flourishes, it is, as Sachs says in an interview, driven by a distinctly modern sensibility. For a movie about secrets and lies, it's eye-wateringly open about its characters' motivations.

What really makes it fly are the performances of the main men. Cooper, an actor who seems to reincarnate for every role, is eerily and fittingly unreachable as the clammy, hungry Harry; we never know whether he's in a comedy or a drama and it keeps us on edge.

It highlights the contrast with the suave and calculating Richard, the film's narrator, a role in which Brosnan confirms the effortless command of self-mocking comedy he showed as the washed-up hitman in the underrated

Matador

. He is having a lot of fun in this film and he is a lot of fun as a result. Watch for the scene in which he digests a sudden, shocking realisation at Harry's beach house: this is a great actor at the top of his game.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams, David Wenham

Director:

Ira Sachs

Running time:

90 mins

Rating:

PG (sexual references)

Screening:

Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto