Though Anne is the one who gets James, Bule, and herself in all the trouble, and is unfaithful besides, she's the only one of the three who has a plain and natural desire to tell the truth. She's isn't "practical," in the sense of being inured to moral compromise; she isn't concerned about picking and choosing among the consequences of her actions. James is the one who at first insists on doing the right thing, until doing so means unpleasant consequences for himself. Even Bule, so morally lax he's nearly horizontal--literally, in Everett's amusingly marble-mouthed performance--doesn't try to hide his base motives nearly as much as James ends up doing. James is the wronged party, innocent of injurious behavior, and yet all the hypocrisy ends up on his side. There's nothing objectively wrong with James and yet it's nearly impossible to warm to him, which offers a much cleaner experience of identification with character than is usual. (There's no complacency in Fellowes's writing of the character or in Wilkinson's amazing performance.) Finally, the trouble resolves itself not through James's maneuvering but through a remarkable act of generosity in recompense for Anne's much-evidenced compassion. As Maggie, Bassett is flawless in her few, key scenes leading up to this turn. (Bassett also delivers one of the movie's most memorable replies, to James--"There's a Londoner talking!"--which underlines the importance of context here.)

Structurally, with James uncovering more of the mystery than he can assimilate happily, Separate Lies bears a resemblance to Oedipus Rex, though when James learns the truth he is not pressed forward through agony to universal revelation to anything like the same degree. Fellowes keeps everything on a human scale. And though the crux of the story and the depiction of the upper-class country set bears some resemblance to both F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the movie doesn't set its fallible characters up as representatives of some larger spiritual problem. Anne, for her part, is not like Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan, who is measured against the protagonist's impossible, romantic ideal. Nor is she like Waugh's Brenda Last, or later Virginia Troy in the Sword of Honour Trilogy, women who allegorically represent the spiritual blindness of the men they marry and betray. (Virginia, pregnant and broke and hoping to snag her Catholic ex-husband in London in late 1943, complains to him, "I've had a dreary war so far. I almost wish I'd stayed in America. It all seemed such fun at first, but it didn't last.")

On the contrary, Emily Watson's strength as Anne is her ordinariness, both in her moral slips and her need to confess them. Anne is not a great embattled heroine but a woman whose husband expects something out of the ordinary that just isn't in her. The movie doesn't justify her romantic escapades on this basis, or ask us to share her ecstasies, but neither does it villainize her. Watson inspiredly gives Anne both childlike docility and childlike secretiveness; her pug-nosed prettiness is somehow incomplete. Then, as the character comes more and more into the open, Watson gives you a sense of some instinctive interplay between instability and stability in Anne. It's always much clearer what she's moving away from than what she's moving towards; she doesn't understand what she's doing herself, any more than her husband does. The writing, and Watson's performance, are so pointed and precise they achieve a small miracle: Anne is believable as a character because her motives elude you, as the motives of the confounding people you meet in life elude you. By the end, however, it appears that the interconnected disasters she set off, plus one she's not responsible for, have surprisingly helped her grow up.