Married Life |  | Actor: Pierce Brosnan
Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.94
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 29794
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Region: 99
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 91 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.9
MPN: COLD25809D
UPC: 043396258099
EAN: 0043396258099
ASIN: B0013FZUP6
Theatrical Release Date: March 7, 2008
Release Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A strong blend of suspense, star-crossed romance and wry comedy of manners, Married Life is an unconventional human drama about the irresistible power and utter madness of love. Harry (Chris Cooper) decides he must kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) because he loves her too much to let her suffer when he leaves her. Harry and his much younger girlfriend Kay (Rachel McAdams) are head over heels in love but his best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) wants to win Kay for himself. As Harry implements his awkward plan for murdering his wife, the other characters are occupied with their own deceptions. Like Harry, they are overwhelmed by their passions, but still struggle to avoid hurting others. Married Life is an uncommonly adult film that surprises and confounds expectations. While it plays with mystery and intrigue, its ultimate concern is: What is Married Life? In its sly way, Married Life poses perceptive questions about the seasonal discontents and unforeseen joys of of all long-term relationships.
Amazon.com
Far too many period productions look right, but feel wrong. Set in 1949, Married Life doesn't just bring the post-war era to vivid life with cigarettes and cocktails aplenty; it even plays like a product of the time. In that respect, it calls to mind AMC's Mad Men, except Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue) takes a lighter tone towards domestic disharmony. In this well-scrubbed suburban world, middle-class wives, like Pat (Patricia Clarkson), build their lives around their husbands. Pat and Harry (Chris Cooper) seem happy, but Harry confesses to his pal, Richard (narrator Pierce Brosnan), that the spark is gone. He plans to leave Pat for vibrant young war widow Kay (Rachel McAdams in a role that recalls The Notebook). Once Richard, a notorious ladies man, gets a gander at the platinum blonde, he secretly sets out to win her affections, while Harry plots to take Pat out of the picture. Married Life almost simulates one of Alfred Hitchcock's pessimistic disquisitions on matrimony, yet Harry and Richard seek less hurtful means to achieve their goals. Though women's lib has yet to hit the suburbs, Pat and Kay harbor desires of their own, and the best-laid plans soon go awry. Though Kay could use further development, this ensemble hums along almost as harmoniously as the quartet in Starting Out in the Evening. Along with co-writer Oren Moverman (I'm Not There), Sachs transforms John Bingham's 1953 novel, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, into an insightful treatise on love, marriage, and fidelity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 Acts of Deception in a Muted, Twisty Homage to Post-WWII Domestic Melodramas December 29, 2009
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
I think director/co-writer Ira Sachs' subtle 2007 homage to the old-fashioned studio melodramas of the 1940s and 50s could have used more of the Baroque feverishness of a Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows) to make the adultery-driven plot more intriguing stylistically - perhaps a face slap here, a gun confrontation there, even a shouting match in a restaurant. Instead, Sachs, along with co-writer Oren Moverman (The Messenger), downplays the overripe theatrics in favor of a more Hitchcockian approach to their noirish fable about the transient rules of love and deception. The resulting film is fun to watch due to its faithful period depiction but sometimes little more than a moral exercise in punishing the subversive thoughts and actions of the seemingly staid protagonist.
It's 1949, and the plot centers on Harry, a middle-aged and very married Manhattan executive, who finds himself in love with the much younger Kay, a WWII widow who enjoys the attention of a man so devoted to her. Harry decides he cannot divorce his wife Pat for fear of breaking her heart. In fact, he thinks it's more charitable to murder her by poisoning her digestive powder which she takes religiously every day. Harry's best friend Richard is aware of Harry's intentions and gets caught in the middle trying to save the marriage while finding himself becoming attracted to Kay as well. Not quite the victim she would seem to be, Pat has secrets of her own, which leads to a roundelay of events befitting the increasingly uneasy blend of treachery and absolution. Sachs capably keeps things afloat even when the suspense factor appears overly muted.
A smart quartet of actors has been cast beginning with Chris Cooper (Adaptation) effectively embodying the crushed soul that Harry has become. Providing the voiceover narration from his character's limited perspective, Pierce Brosnan (The Matador) uses his naturally erudite manner to great wry effect as Richard, while Patricia Clarkson (Whatever Works) gives added dimensions of knowingness and cunning to Pat. With her hair dyed an unflattering peroxide blonde, Rachel McAdams (The Notebook) looks poised to play the femme fatale, but her character is more ingenuous than she looks. That basically means McAdams has little bandwidth to add any complex shading to Kay. The 2008 DVD offers an informative commentary from Sachs, the theatrical trailer, and three alternate endings, each flash-forwarding the story sixteen years later to O. Henry-type resolutions. While interesting, none really add that much to the ending used in the movie.
But What about those endings?? October 10, 2009
Les G. Solomon (NSW, Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Married Life"is an interesting film, beautifully directed and performed, perhaps a little too larconic at times and with a middle section that lags and sags a bit. Yet it ultimately becomes a different movie at the end, going from a film noir romantic suspense thriller to something a little more akin to something John Irving would have written. I agree it's not a comedy and there are only fleeting moments of ironic humour, but, hey, what about the alternate endings.??!! Clearly the reason the film is so short (at 87 mins)is that there is a whole final chapter running about 7-8 minutes that the director left on the cutting room floor. We get to see three edits of this final chapter on the DVD and it turns it again into quite a different film.No one else here seems to have commented on these endings and I would love to know what people thought, personally I rather liked the melancholic stroll through time feel these gave the film and feel there is an even better film lurking in here somewhere. The theatrical version, pleasing enough as it is, is weighed down with too much of an attempt to make it noirish and comical. This could be the story of a journey through life and its strange and sad ironies.
 Quiet look on married life May 7, 2009
Reader (Boca Raton, FL)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Married life is a mystery, not only in late 40s, time when the events of this movie take place, but rather since beginning of time. Pat and Harry have known each other since they were children. They have been married for a long time. But perhaps because they know each other so well, their marriage is predictable and tejir interaction civilized. Without each other knowing about the other, they both have love affairs outside of the mariage. Pat with a young writer and Harry with a beautiful and lonely war widow. In spite of being in love with their new love interests, both Pat and Harry are hesitant to divorce each other in fear not to hurt the other emotionally. So is it better to simply kill off the other person and spare them the pain of humiliation?
As love triangles go and notions of what excitement married life gives, this is one of the most interesting movies I have seen. The slow pace of the careful storytelling is mesmerizing as we learn about each person's inner battles, desires and motives.
 What you see conflicts with what you hear May 3, 2009
Douglas B. Moran (Palo Alto, CA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The story itself is negligible and uninteresting. For some period pieces, this is not a problem because the visuals or the character studies are the core of the movie. But here, the visuals were nothing special (other reviewers here disagreed). And the characters were poorly rendered--clearly the fault of the writers, not the actors (who just had nothing to work with).
For example, the dialog _says_ that Richard (Pierce Brosnan) is a womanizer, but what we _see_ is quite different. There are similar disconnects for all the other characters.
Similarly the (trivial) story arc depends entirely on the voice-over--without it, I would have had a complete different interpretation of events. Without the audio, I _never_ would have thought that Harry (Chris Cooper) was in love with Kay (McAdams) nor she with him. Nor would I have suspected that Richard and Harry were more than casual acquaintances.
The sequence where we are waiting to find out whether Harry has murdered his wife is so far beyond over-wrought and over-extended that I became angry at the movie for being so blatant in trying to jerk my emotions around.
Married Life by Brandon M. Moskos March 16, 2009
Brandon Moskos
This is a movie about married life in the late 40's. It shows a married couples' problem in that time period and how leaving your wife or husband was not an option in that era. Both the husband and wife are not in love anymore and they're both cheating, but they will not ask for a divorce, because they can't bare to see the other person unhappy. This was true that divorce did not happen in this time period, but I thought the story that the husband would rather see his wife dead than divorce her is crazy. The movie was suspenseful, but I thought it was unfunny and not that entertaining. I recommend renting this movie rather than buying, this movie was average.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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