Ira Sachs mashes up matrimonial crises and murder in Married Life. When Ira Sachs was shooting his sophomore feature, Forty Shades of Blue (2005), he found himself reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith novels. Even the keenest eye would have a hard time spotting anything remotely resembling a Highsmithian influence in the movie’s Memphis-set love triangle among a veteran music producer, his Russian wife and her stepson.
But there was something about the writer’s work that kept him rapt while he completed his follow-up to 1996’s The Delta. After Sachs had exhausted the author’s canon (and premiered Forty Shades at Sundance, where it took home the Grand Jury prize), he indulged in a full-blown pulp-fiction binge. That was when the filmmaker discovered Five Roundabouts To Heaven, John Bingham’s 1953 page-turner about adultery, double-crosses and a man seriously considering killing his spouse. Suddenly, Sachs knew he’d found his next project.
The director’s adaptation, Married Life, sticks closely to the source material: A man (Chris Cooper) starts planning to murder his wife (Patricia Clarkson) after he becomes smitten with a young blond bombshell (Rachel McAdams). The fact that his dapper best friend (Pierce Brosnan) is equally bewitched by this platinum-haired beauty only complicates things further. ‘I really wanted to try making a character drama driven by plot, instead of a story driven by nothing but character,’ Sachs, 42, says over lunch at a downtown bistro. ‘Which is exactly how you’d describe my previous two films. But that’s why I was so taken by all these pulp stories: They are almost nothing but plot. They simply boil down to what went wrong, and what might happen next.’
While Married Life’s macabre elements, such as a preoccupation with how to properly poison a loved one, seem perfectly in sync with the director’s previous gritty, moody explorations of desire, its tone couldn’t be more different. Though Sachs notes that he purposely moved the story to 1949 in order to avoid what he calls ‘the mythic quality of the 50s,’ the film’s lavish style immediately brings to mind both the repressed Eisenhower era and the glamorous artificiality of that period’s Hollywood melodramas. Sachs deftly blends muted elements of the decade’s farces into his suspense story, which occasionally turns the movie into a cross between Dial M For Murder and a Ross Hunter-produced comedy.
‘Yes, it’s certainly the most movie-ish of my movies,’ the director admits. ‘Part of what attracted me to the story was that it would be a structure for making a film with stars and a grand sense of style. As I get older, I find that my tastes are becoming a little more romantic, and there was a need to move away from a certain youthful pedagogy that was a little on the puritanical side. Realism is no longer an end goal for me.’ He’s quick to point out, however, that Married Life shouldn’t be taken as some sort of elaborate wink-wink joke. ‘There isn’t anything the least bit camp about any of the performances,’ Sachs says. ‘This is meant to be taken straight.’
Whether modern audiences can watch women in swing skirts and men in gray flannel suits without smirking remains to be seen, but both the director and his cast think the film’s emotional honesty is strong enough to overcome any generational baggage. ‘We all agreed from the very beginning that irony was not an option,’ Patricia Clarkson says, calling from Los Angeles.
‘It’s very different from something like Far From Heaven [in which Clarkson co-stars], which also works as a direct homage. None of us thought of this as a retro film; it was more like a modern film that happened to be set in the past. Both Chris and I wanted to play these people whose marriage is falling apart with as much emotional honesty as possible, though I do think it’s Ira’s lightest film.’ She laughs, adding ‘I’m not sure he could make something without a little darkness in it. That’s just who he is.’
‘The joke was that all of my films could have been titled The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,’ Sachs says, chuckling. ‘Though I think I’ve done my unofficial trilogy of deceit and got that thwarted desire thing out of my system. People have said that Brosnan’s line at the end [“Whoever knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you, please raise your hand”] is pessimistic, but I don’t think it is at all. Even in the most communicative relationships, you’re both together and separate. It’s just a simple human truth.’
Married Life is out in cinemas this month.
