An ode to Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s, with its rich story, its post-war middle class mores of US society, its production design and its characters blundering around a moral dilemma.
Comment
07/18/08
Married Life (2008)
58 %
Reviews Counted: 105 Fresh: 61 Rotten:44 Average Rating: 6/10
Consensus:
Married Life has excellent performances and flashes of dark wit, but it suffers from tonal shifts and uneven pacing.
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Theatrical Release: Mar 7, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $1,197,472
Synopsis: This melodramatic musing on the trials and tribulations of marriage features a small but talented ensemble cast that includes Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper, and Rachel McAdams. Set in 1949, the story opens into a picturesque, affluent suburb where Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) resides... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams, David Wenham
Director: Ira Sachs
Screenwriter: Ira Sachs, Oren Moverman
Producer: Sidney Kimmel, Jawal Nga, Steve Golin, Ira Sachs
Composer: Dickon Hinchliffe
Screenwriter: Ira Sachs, Oren Moverman
Producer: Sidney Kimmel, Jawal Nga, Steve Golin, Ira Sachs
Composer: Dickon Hinchliffe
Reviews
Top Critic
The ensemble cast chemistry is superb in its nearly suffocating tangle of repressed passions, but the family-values wrap-up of all these messy erotic tensions feels ultimately far too pat and unresolved.
09/04/08
Thought-provoking themes swirl around in this drama, brought to life by a skilled cast and a director who plays with Hitchcockian themes and imagery. In the end, it feels a bit undercooked, but the actors keep us glued to the screen.
08/01/08
Superbly directed, thought-provoking blend of Hitchcock movies, 1940s pastiche and Bette Davis-style melodrama, featuring terrific performances from Cooper and Clarkson.
08/01/08
It’s a good cast, with Cooper outstanding, but Sachs’s direction is stodgy and the screenplay is grindingly self-conscious.
08/01/08
The tangled web which slowly causes the film’s relationships to disintegrate is brilliantly woven. However, you can’t help wishing the climax packs a bit more of a dramatic punch.
08/01/08
Top Critic
A noirish 1940s-set character study, it’s an initially intriguing tale of infidelity and betrayal that smoulders, but never quite catches fire.
08/01/08
Top Critic
A classy cast and production design to die for are the only features of note in an underpowered tale of adultery and intrigue in ’50s America.
08/01/08
Married Life may fall short of the best Hollywood melodrama, but its nicely observed situations and old-fashioned storytelling ironically lend this a freshness more on-the-nose infidelity tales are missing.
08/01/08
The movie is determinedly low-key, but honest, with a wrenching break-up scene, sharp work from Clarkson, and a final thought that lingers, about never really knowing what your other half is thinking.
08/01/08
A well-acted but lugubrious noir, which is somehow not quite thrilling enough to be a thriller, and not quite profound enough to be a character study.
08/01/08
Top Critic
The layers of deception are as meticulously constructed as the impeccable 1940s production and costume design. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t maintain that distinctive noir cruelty, as hard as red lacquered finger nails.
08/01/08
Top Critic
A mannered comedy of manners that, in its eagerness to be all things to all people, ends up being nothing much of anything.
07/31/08
It looks beautiful, and the convoluted plotting is initially the right side of Hitchcock pastiche, but the central conundrum is teased out over so many twists and false climaxes that ultimately it’s a shrug, not a shock, which greets the denouement.
07/31/08
In the end, it feels a bit undercooked, but the actors keep us glued to the screen
07/03/08
It swings from Far From Heaven-alike lush melodrama to Double Indemnity-like noir to something approaching black comedy, and the transitions never quite work. Accomplished then, but no classic.
06/27/08
Top Critic
It's elegant, unhurried, and, if you meet it half way, softly satisfying ... like the muffled clap of a velvet-covered ring box snapping shut.
06/02/08
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