Tender mercy killings: murderous intentions clog perky postwar spousal calm in Ira Sachs' Married Life, now on DVD

1949, the Pacific Northwest. Buttoned-down Harry (Chris Cooper) is in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams), a war widow apparently one-third his age wearing in her first appearance a conspicuously vertiginous bun in her supernaturally Hitchcock blonde hair. Harry's in love, so Harry needs to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). But Harry fears the shock will kill poor Pat, and thus Harry figures he’d best beat the grim reaper to the punch and just quietly, mercifully poison her to death. Watching all this from the sidelines and itching for a chance to get in the game is Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s dapper, dashing old buddy with the sly eyes who wears his hat just so. He offers his cabin in the woods for Harry and Kay to tryst the night away but all the while has his eyes on the prize.

Based on John Bingham’s 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which also goes by the decidedly less cagey title of The Tender Poisoner, Married Life ostensibly excavates post-war repression but really works best as a multiple character study and mood piece that bows devoutly in the direction of the filmmakers whose work drew upon the shadow side of that period’s optimistic façade: Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls (or at least The Reckless Moment, that marvelously coded domestic noir) and the aforementioned master of suspense. There’s even a scene in which a fateful decision is made while watching a James Mason movie. Directed by Ira Sachs, this movie, a cocktail of equal parts neo-noir and black comedy, is nicely paced and quite engaging, if rather over-calculated and over-reliant on conventional attitudes toward the era’s conformist principals. But maybe its themes seemed just so 1949, or at least 2002, the year of Todd Haynes’ sublime Sirk homage Far From Heaven—Married Life didn’t have much of a life at the box office. It’s now looking for a new one on DVD.

Married Life's distance from its 60-year-old story becomes critical rather than just temporal by way of pairing its characters’ outwardly dominant traits with their polar opposites. Harry is the picture of the gentle company man and supportive spouse, but he’s fucking homicidal; Pat seems the ever-adoring, erotically undemanding homemaker about to get ditched for a younger sexpot, but truth is she’s a minx who thinks people get married first and foremost to get laid on a regular basis; Richard is the poster boy for elegantly aging sexual nomadism but deep down is getting all choked up about settling down and picking out the curtains with Kay. In every case these potentially too-cute character reversals are given breath and texture by the superb cast, Clarkson especially. Only McAdams feels a bit flat here. Totally hot, but flat. (Just like, to twist an expression, Georgia asphalt.) After seeing her shine in The Lucky Ones, it strikes me as kinda funny that she’s more at home playing a soldier than a soldier’s wife.

Breach and the delicious duplicity of Chris Cooper

He’s played a hard-ass retired US Colonel and ball-busting father choking with unfulfilled homosexual desires that yield murderous impulses. He’s played a hunter of rare plants, deeply unsavoury, a quintessential outsider, yet the secret lover of Meryl Streep. He’s played a candidate for the Colorado governorship, grammatically challenged, neo-conservative, seemingly modelled after Dubya. He’s got thin lips, fried egg eyes, and can easily embody the pappy who never hits you but wields the threat always. These facts beg the question: who is this Chris Cooper guy, and can we trust him?

Clearly, the answer is no, and that’s precisely why its difficult to imagine Breach working as marvellously as it does without Cooper. He can be anybody in a way that keeps audiences unnerved, thus he’s so damn good as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent convicted of treason in 2001 for selling US secrets for $1.4 million, an expert on Russian intelligence for 25 years before becoming the biggest traitor in US history.

Our first glimpse has him clutching a rosary in church: an instant acknowledgement of culpability in a movie so loaded with suspicion. Hanssen’s a devoted Catholic who loves playing with the grandkids. He doesn’t like to see woman in pantsuits. “The world doesn’t need another Hilary Clinton,” he sighs. He also seems to have a fondness for porn, especially when his wife’s the star. It’s this little vice that allows the Feds to assign Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to spy on Hanssen without knowing the reality of the charges against him, thus becoming close to this conservative but weirdly charismatic man.

This is dream material for director Billy Ray, who explored another real-life double life with equal panache in Shattered Glass, his film about the boy wonder journalist who wrote dozens of fraudulent pieces for The New Republic before getting caught. Ray and co-writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko build suspense with tremendous confidence considering we know how it’s going to end.

Cooper is Ray’s biggest coup, but Laura Linney, as the Fed leading the investigation, is just as good. She’s tough: the way she slides a pager across a table at O’Neil when she could have easily handed it to him; the way she rarely moves a superfluous muscle. Phillipe is doomed to being less impressive in such company, but he keeps his performance clean and convinces, crucially so in the scenes where we see him develop reverence for Hanssen (O’Neil, schooled by Jesuits, had a soft spot for Jesus people). 

Breach opened last year, the same week as Ghost Rider, and it sort of vanished without making much of a dent at the box office. In any case, without a major star at its centre or shit blowing up, it probably never had much of a chance, and it’s a shame. It’s a very satisfying thriller.