Married Life -Blu-ray Plus BD Live-

Product Description Harry (Academy Award® winner Chris Cooper, 2002, Best Supporting Actor, Adaptation) and Pat (Academy Award® nominee Patricia Clarkson, 2003, Best Supporting Actress, Pieces of April) have a nice, respectable marriage. But when Harry falls in love with a beautiful young lady, he decides he must kill his wife, because divorce would cause her too much pain. Richard (Pierce Brosnan) is Harry's caddish best friend who realizes he must have Harry's lovely mistress (Rachel McAdams) for himself. Love and friendship are contemplated with noir-style suspense and wry humor in this sly comedy that reveals there's nothing quite as devastating, or as divine, as married life. Amazon.com Far too many period productions look right, but feel wrong. Set in 1949, Married Life doesn't just bring the post-war era to vivid life with cigarettes and cocktails aplenty; it even plays like a product of the time. In that respect, it calls to mind AMC's Mad Men, except Ira Sachs ( Forty Shades of Blue) takes a lighter tone towards domestic disharmony. In this well-scrubbed suburban world, middle-class wives, like Pat (Patricia Clarkson), build their lives around their husbands. Pat and Harry (Chris Cooper) seem happy, but Harry confesses to his pal, Richard (narrator Pierce Brosnan), that the spark is gone. He plans to leave Pat for vibrant young war widow Kay (Rachel McAdams in a role that recalls The Notebook). Once Richard, a notorious ladies man, gets a gander at the platinum blonde, he secretly sets out to win her affections, while Harry plots to take Pat out of the picture. Married Life almost simulates one of Alfred Hitchcock?s pessimistic disquisitions on matrimony, yet Harry and Richard seek less hurtful means to achieve their goals. Though women's lib has yet to hit the suburbs, Pat and Kay harbor desires of their own, and the best-laid plans soon go awry. Though Kay could use further development, this ensemble hums along almost as harmoniously as the quartet in Starting Out in the Evening. Along with co-writer Oren Moverman ( I'm Not There), Sachs transforms John Bingham?s 1953 novel, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, into an insightful treatise on love, marriage, and fidelity. -- Kathleen C. Fennessy