Marriage and alienation at mid-century

A repeated line in "Married Life" is the adage that one person can't build his happiness on another's unhappiness. But this sardonic cocktail of adultery, double-crosses, seduction and murder plots goes on to prove that not only can one do it, it's almost mandatory.

In a setting familiar from film noir, Harry (Chris Cooper) and his lifelong friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) share a table at a swank bar and grill, dignified men making small talk. Harry, his face glowing with sadness, confides that there's a problem with his marriage. His wife, Pat, (Patricia Clarkson) doesn't understand his romantic nature. She's solely interested in sensual pleasure; it reduces him to bleak despair. (How demeaning in 1949 for a man to be desired for his body!) From this conversational monotone erupts an explosive confession. Harry is going to leave Pat for Kay (Rachel McAdams), a docile younger woman.

Brosnan, playing Richard as if savoir faire was written into his genetic code, cautions, "We all have to put up with something in life, Harry." He changes his attitude when he meets Kay, falls hard and decides to steal her himself. Unaware, Harry moves ahead with the next step in his pursuit of happiness. To spare Pat the humiliation of divorce, he's going to poison her.

Writer/director Ira Sachs shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of postwar studio movies, but reshuffles the deck of plot conventions, keeping us uncertain about what's coming next. Sachs' suspenseful twists are all the creepier because they break through the frame of what purports to be a saucy comedy about a bon vivant seducer. The film sprawls across the boundaries between the comic and the tragic, good and evil, defining life as what happens in between.

The story is original, the characters complex. Luminously blond, wistful Kay is an honorable war widow, the furthest thing imaginable from a stock femme fatale. Harry, crushed by the fatigue of being a decent man, sees his chance for happiness just a murder away. Clarkson, who can shake up any room she enters, gives Pat such a smoldering sensuality that she could have powered the projector during a blackout. As Richard, Brosnan carries the story along with crisp narration, mixing sympathy for his suffering pal with an alpha wolf's self-interest. When he moves in on Kay, his caddish behavior turns out to be precisely the right thing, for exactly the wrong reason.

At times the film has the bewildering feeling of a piece that was started, set aside and resumed months later, with no recollection of the original tone. By turns it's a work of wry humor, then skullduggery, then psychological realism in Hitchcock wrapping paper. The finale, a half-hopeful, half-heartbroken note of reconciliation, casts a corrosive eye on happily-ever-after fadeouts. By the 1950s, the alienation of frustrated couples was a matter for tranquilizers, not poison. "Married Life" is a glimpse of where a mixed-up culture was heading.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186