Wilkinson has the more understandable character. James is a highly civilized and rational man--that's why he criticizes Anne, because he wants her to do better. Like many another overeducated fool, he imagines that life can be brought up to the mark by application of principles and relentless monitoring. At the same time, although James believes he's reacting to what other people have set in motion, it all seems to land in his lap. He thus suffers in confusion, because he can't grasp the problem, though all his habits of problem-solving would be useless even if he could. (They are, in fact, central to the problem.) Is there anything more difficult than negotiating with yourself to want something less that you want a lot?

Wilkinson shows enormous power as James, but it's scaled to a high-priced corporate attorney. Again, the precision, the refusal to overstate the magnitude of the characters and situations, is immaculate without being fussy or limiting. This is full-bodied acting without the self-important excess of an actor overreaching for the tragic. Wilkinson does have the saturnine bulk of actors such as Albert Finney and Danny Aiello, particularly when he's drunk and bitter, but the heaviness of spirit is all James's. Wilkinson effects as translucent a representation of turbid emotions as you could ask for. And though he is not showing off, his range is stunning. In that brief, glowering drunk scene, for instance, you hear reverberations of the legendary male voices of the English theater. And at the other end of the scale, when Anne hopefully says that not all cancer victims die, and James replies out of his newly reduced expectations, "Yes, they do," Wilkinson's morbidity is so wittily understated the entire audience laughed out loud.

This is Fellowes's directorial debut, and it's hard to believe this textured, supple drama is the work of the man who wrote the scripts for Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001) and Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2004). Vanity Fair, which turns Thackeray's irony into feminist romance, is among the worst botches of literary genre in movie history. As for Gosford Park, the murder mystery it's built around trivializes its pretensions to being a masters-and-servants epic (the weak, anachronistic theatrical in-jokes about the American actor researching his role in a Charlie Chan picture don't help), and its view of those relationships is dismally narrow. The difference among Maggie's relationships with the three main characters in Separate Lies shows what's missing from Gosford Park--the sense that while rigid class lines may separate the English upper classes and their servants, they nonetheless live on terms of intimacy and there is, of course, a wide range of responses within that system. The fundamentally humorless, melodramatic-socialist view of class in Gosford Park is like English country life glimpsed through an iron curtain. (By shaping the miserable revelation of abuse and exploitation to the contrivances of a detective story, Fellowes's script misses the wallop of the mistress-and-servant relationship handled naturalistically by the Goncourts in Germinie Lacerteux.)