Movie Review: Julian Fellowes' Separate Lies - Precisely - Page 3

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.

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.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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