Married Life (2005)

  Two decisions determine this film’s perspective on the duplicities and compromises that characterize modern American marriage.

Director Ira Sachs sets the film in the suburban and executive posh of 1949. That’s the golden age of naive illusions about marriage. Peyton Place had yet to puncture the pretence to suburban innocence. The buoyant voice of Doris Day sets off the cheer, promising she can’t give us anything but love, baby. Here the lovers dish out as much duplicity as love.

Hence the gloss and brightness in every domestic scene and the affluence of the business and club settings. Indeed the film evokes the bright style of the master of ‘50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk, attended by his detachment and satiric bite. Of course the historic setting still implicates contemporary marriage as well. Marriage is marriage.

Sachs’ second decision is to cast as narrator the slickest and most dishonourable character,  Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan). That’s like Iago getting the direct addresses to his audience, which immediately poisons the viewer’s perspective upon the saintly Othello. 

Initially Richard confirms his opposition to marriage. He ends up marrying the chirpy Kay (Rachel MacAdams) himself. To get there he has to betray his prosaic best friend Harry (Chris Cooper), who’s planning to kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) so he can marry Kay. Richard also helps Pat conceal her illicit affair. Of course Richard serves mainly his own end, to win Kay for himself. Richard initiates the repeated bromide: “I'm not at all certain that one can build happiness upon the unhappiness of someone else”  — especially not someone with our moral sense! 

Despite being a war widow, Kay seems childlike in her wide eyes, glowing hair and smile, and her principal principle: “A woman needs to be loved, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love.” That’s the ‘50s sense of “the woman’s place.” She’s as ripe for Richard’s seduction as she was to salvage the lachrymose Harry.

The film ends on the neighbourhood’s happy couples playing charades — an apt metaphor for the reduction of love and marriage to shallow performances. After all, as Richard confidently assumes: “Whoever in this room who knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you... please, raise your hand... I know you can't, not honestly.” But if the characters act love enough they may eventually feel it. 

        Finally, Pat and Harry move silently together cleaning up after the guests. Their harmony is as deep as ever, now built upon their respective abandoned passions. That shot — from outside, through the living room window  — echoes the first: Harry’s insubstantial reflection on his high office window, while his duplicitous best friend Richard introduces him and his tale.