Married Life

Is it possible to build happiness on the misery of others? Pierce Brosnan (pictured), as the cynical Richard, deploys the question with Machiavellian expertise in Ira Sachs’s follow-up to his Sundance-conquering ‘Forty Shades of Blue’. Richard’s lifelong friend Harry (Chris Cooper) is planning to murder his wife of 20 years to marry a platinum-haired moppet half his age. As a gold-standard cad, Richard begins an obsessive seduction of his friend’s new love and, by chance, is handed an opportunity to make everyone happy.

But, ignorant of Harry’s plot, Richard determines to build his own happiness whatever the cost.Sachs’s barbed comedy burrows into such a lushly realised portrait of post-war American suburbia that the thinly drawn protagonists have a hard time competing with it. It 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.