There’s an old phrase: “the heart wants what it wants.” True enough, although perhaps it should read: “the heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t anymore.” Whether it’s a child growing too old for their favorite teddy bear, a girl taking down a poster of her favorite boy band, or a boy deciding that his favorite video game isn’t cool enough anymore, this desire to acquire along with the persistent thought that there’s always something much more enticing just around the corner only grows stronger as we age. And it especially seems to rear its ugly head as we begin dating and discover that some friends find themselves in relationships simply out of habit or fear of solitude, just biding their time until something better comes along or realizing much too late that the person we want isn’t on our arm as we’d first assumed in the mad throes of early passion, but rather the promise of someone entirely different altogether. Or is it?
Such is the stuff of Greek tragedies, women’s weepies of the 1940’s and ’50s, soap operas, TV melodramas, and dare I say a large instigator for action in one of my favorite genres—film noir. Instead of simply relying on Ladies’ Home Journal article advice in the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column, trial separations, couples counseling, or tawdry extramarital hotel dalliances—in the days of film noir, infidelity, or even the sheer lust for another turned deadly in cinematic classics such as Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice.
A self-proclaimed “ardent film buff, with a particular love for 1940s and 1950s movies,” as he noted in the press release, writer/director Ira Sachs crafted a wickedly funny hybrid of both film noir and women’s weepies of the same two decades with his woefully underrated stunner Married Life, now available on DVD. Co-written with Oren Moverman and based on John Bingham’s vintage pulp novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, this sumptuous period film set in 1949 tells a deceptively simple story that—in the hands of anyone else—would’ve seemed entirely predictable. Summed up best by Sachs himself in the release, he relishes in the smile-inducing, one-sentence version of “a gentle, middle-aged man who falls in love decides to kill his wife because divorce would cause her too much pain.”
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