This is a film which has gotten the traditional "3 cinemas in London"-type release a couple of weeks ago and no immediate prospect at my local art cinemas so I caught it online. Probably a good thing I didn't pay to see it, it's just a failure on almost every level.

Over a meal Chris Cooper explains to his best friend Pierce Brosnan that he wants to end his marriage to Patricia Clarkson because he is having an affair with Rachel McAdams. That's the basic set up of the plot. Cooper is okay, Clarkson is fine, McAdams is quite good and Brosnan is in full snooze mode so the acting is moderate. The material though and how it is executed is decidedly below par.

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl0/1/13839/10_2008/married-life-1.preview.jpg

The film tries to be a dark comedy. It fails miserably on that front, I didn't laugh once. It also is a complete bust in terms of drama, all of the scenes are flat, there's no injection of urgency or vitality at all, it's just hackneyed work behind the camera. The script is also especially poor - limp, predictable and doesn't provide anything for the fine cast to really get hold of.

So a poor film all round, it's not successful dramatically so can't be taken seriously as a drama and is a complete bomb comedically so cannot be a successful comedy either. From that double failure the tone is all over the place and the film just limps along while the actors try their best to save what is frankly unsaveable. The storytelling gets more condescending the longer the film goes both in terms of writing (especially the sputtering, intermittent voiceover from Brosnan) and direction (repeatedly spelling things out visually for those not paying attention), for once this is a film that deserves the complete lack of distribution it has found for itself. At the end Brosnan's voiceover claims "it was a funny story in its way" - they clearly wish that was the case, but sadly it wasn't.