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Reviews Counted:113
Fresh:64
Rotten:49
Average Rating:6/10
Consensus: Married Life has excellent performances and flashes of dark wit, but it suffers from tonal shifts and uneven pacing.
Theatrical Release:01-08-2008
Synopsis: This melodramatic musing on the trials and tribulations of marriage features a small but talented ensemble cast that includes Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper, and Rachel McAdams. Set in 1949, the... [More]
Starring: Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams
Director: Ira Sachs
Thought-provoking themes swirl around in this drama, brought to life by a skilled cast and a director who plays with Hitchcockian themes and imagery. In the end, it feels a bit undercooked, but the actors keep us glued to the screen.
Superbly directed, thought-provoking blend of Hitchcock movies, 1940s pastiche and Bette Davis-style melodrama, featuring terrific performances from Cooper and Clarkson.
It’s a good cast, with Cooper outstanding, but Sachs’s direction is stodgy and the screenplay is grindingly self-conscious.
The tangled web which slowly causes the film’s relationships to disintegrate is brilliantly woven. However, you can’t help wishing the climax packs a bit more of a dramatic punch.
Top CriticA noirish 1940s-set character study, it’s an initially intriguing tale of infidelity and betrayal that smoulders, but never quite catches fire.
Top CriticA classy cast and production design to die for are the only features of note in an underpowered tale of adultery and intrigue in ’50s America.
Top CriticMarried Life may fall short of the best Hollywood melodrama, but its nicely observed situations and old-fashioned storytelling ironically lend this a freshness more on-the-nose infidelity tales are missing.
The movie is determinedly low-key, but honest, with a wrenching break-up scene, sharp work from Clarkson, and a final thought that lingers, about never really knowing what your other half is thinking.
Top CriticA well-acted but lugubrious noir, which is somehow not quite thrilling enough to be a thriller, and not quite profound enough to be a character study.
Top CriticThe layers of deception are as meticulously constructed as the impeccable 1940s production and costume design. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t maintain that distinctive noir cruelty, as hard as red lacquered finger nails.
Top CriticA mannered comedy of manners that, in its eagerness to be all things to all people, ends up being nothing much of anything.
Top CriticIt looks beautiful, and the convoluted plotting is initially the right side of Hitchcock pastiche, but the central conundrum is teased out over so many twists and false climaxes that ultimately it’s a shrug, not a shock, which greets the denouement.
Top CriticSuperbly directed, thought-provoking blend of Hitchcock movies, 1940s pastiche and Bette Davis-style melodrama, featuring terrific performances from Cooper and Clarkson.
In the end, it feels a bit undercooked, but the actors keep us glued to the screen
It swings from Far From Heaven-alike lush melodrama to Double Indemnity-like noir to something approaching black comedy, and the transitions never quite work. Accomplished then, but no classic.
Top CriticThe film is hampered by a plodding and unimaginative script whose situations are pedestrian and whose dialogue is much less sparkling than the filmmakers appear to think it is.
The roundelay structure and Hitchcockian nods could have easily given way to a sardonic puppet theater, but Sachs and screenwriter Oren Moverman care too much about their characters to turn them into pawns
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September 04, 2008:
The ensemble cast chemistry is superb in its nearly suffocating tangle of repressed passions, but the family-values wrap-up of all these messy erotic tensions feels ultimately far too pat and unresolved. 
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March 06, 2008:
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March 06, 2008:
The ensemble cast chemistry is superb in its nearly suffocating tangle of repressed passions, but the family-values wrap-up of all these messy erotic tensions feels ultimately far too pat and unresolved.
More...
February 09, 2008:
Trailer & Poster review
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