Though it clearly thinks it's a wise, gently rueful, ironic movie about marriage, Married Life is just a thriller with the juice squeezed out of it. Based on John Bingham's novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, the story of marital secrets and a murderer and his wife at cross-purposes is full of tension and wicked laughter. But the movie takes itself very, very seriously, with its careful, detached attitude, its slow, cautious pace, like an elephant in velvet slippers. With its almost hushed reverence toward the two female leads, it ends up not as a mature, complex study of suburban passion but a plushy soap opera.
Couldn't there have been even one moment of humour scoring off the blonde sweetie-pie? Or couldn't she, intentionally or not, come out with a funny or goofy remark herself? After all, she's not all that holy, carrying on with a married man. But no, we never see her as anything but sweet and very, very earnest. Nor does the movie have the nerve to make Harry the patsy he was clearly born to be, and hand us some sardonic laughs.
It all seems as if the moviemakers were trying really, really hard to make us think they're French.
Couldn't there have been even one moment of humour scoring off the blonde sweetie-pie? Or couldn't she, intentionally or not, come out with a funny or goofy remark herself? After all, she's not all that holy, carrying on with a married man. But no, we never see her as anything but sweet and very, very earnest. Nor does the movie have the nerve to make Harry the patsy he was clearly born to be, and hand us some sardonic laughs.
It all seems as if the moviemakers were trying really, really hard to make us think they're French.