MARRIED LIFE (Ira Sachs, 2008)

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — 13th-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria

Suspenseful films run the risk of being inhuman; when they also bring great compassion to the camera, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) does, they can provide a merciful as well as pitiless experience—richly both, both simultaneously. Ira Sachs has cited Hitchcock’s own favorite among his films as an influence on his Married Life; indeed, references to Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Vertigo (1958) are also woven into the fabric of the film. I love, as you know, Sachs’s The Delta (1996) and Forty Shades of Blue (2005); but Sachs’s latest piece, adapted by him and Oren Moverman from British mystery writer John Bingham’s Five Roundabouts to Heaven, is his most brilliant achievement.
     It begins in 1949, its nostalgia—an attempt to blot out the intervening stock market crash and world war—evoked by Doris Day’s singing the 1928 “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby”: “Dream a while, scheme a while,/ you’re sure to find happiness . . . .” Successful businessman Harry and Pat Allen are presumably happily married. Unbeknownst to one another, however, each has a lover with whom he or she is really in love. Harry’s best friend, Rich, also falls in love with “perfect” Kay, a young, beautiful war widow. They, too, become lovers. Meanwhile, Harry cannot bring himself to leave Pat, so he plots to kill her with the same poison that he has successfully tested on their dog. (Piercingly matter-of-fact: Harry reaches his point of decision in bed when Pat finds and squeezes his hand in the dark.) Rich, to whom Harry has confided his affair, narrates the film; approaching Pat after helping Harry bury the dog, he tells us, “I knew enough to set them all free. . . . If only Harry had stayed by the grave a minute longer, so much might have been changed.” While Pat is at home about to die from the poison with which he has replaced her medicine, Harry walks in on Kay and Rich. That night, he declares, “I lost everything.” Friendship and propriety prevail, and Harry is best man at Rich’s wedding. Rich’s narration is haunted. He addresses us at his and Kay’s wedding celebration: “Did we build our happiness on the unhappiness of others? You be the judge.”
     If we are human, we can scarcely judge; what right have we? But we note the extent to which Sachs’s characters appear ignorant of their own motives. For instance, Harry practically invites Rich to take over Kay when he tells him, “I want you to get to know her like you know Pat”—a revelation, too, that Harry suspects Kay’s infidelity while misidentifying her extramarital partner. Has this wisp of a suspicion pressured his own affair? Pat confides to Rich that she cannot divorce Harry because he needs her; but isn’t this cover for how dearly she also needs Harry, as her voiced suspicion to Harry that he no longer loves her suggests? Is it possible that Kay falls in love with Harry because she needs a powerful father figure to hold her together in the midst of her loss of spouse, whose body has never been found? When Harry cannot bring himself to leave Pat for her, does this cause her image of his power to dissipate, making her ripe for Rich? Does Rich, despite openly disparaging marriage, envy Harry his Pat? Is Harry’s Kay, for him, a substitute for Harry’s Pat? All these possible hidden motives hang in the air.
     Intimate, raw and ultimately shattering, Married Life is terrifically acted, with Chris Cooper, with his (according to Sachs) “face of the Depression,” and Patricia Clarkson, as Harry and Pat, giving their finest, most complex performances. Rachel McAdams, as Kay Nesbitt, is luminous and fragile. Only Pierce Brosnan is less than convincing as Richard Langley insofar as he fails to suggest the torment that would make this character come to us in search of absolution.