"Marriage of Lies," last Saturday's Lifetime "world premiere," turned out to be a surprisingly good suspense thriller, helped by the fact that it contains no openly violent scenes until the very end, one that puts its heroine into a Kafka-like peril that's frightening but plausible and keeps us identifying with her throughout. The heroine is Rachel Wilson (April Bowlby), who seems to be living a nice life in a small town with her husband Tye (Brody Hutzler) and their daughter Ella (Faith Graham). Then Tye suddenly disappears one morning and Rachel spends the next two days rather desultorily looking for him, including stopping by the high school where he's a teacher and athletic coach and trying to get information out of the students in his classes, including one young woman who definitely has a crush on him. Two days after he disappears, Rachel reports him to the police as missing, and the investigation spirals out of control as the police — Detective Roper (Zachary Garred) in particular (he's the partner of Gus, played by Corin Nemec, an older, more Clint Eastwood-esque cop who's more skeptical of the obvious conclusion that Rachel did something to her husband) — decide that Tye must have met with foul play and Rachel must be the guilty party. The people in this small town — who, like those in virtually all movie small towns, make it a point of getting into each other's business and gossiping about each other — decide Rachel is guilty even before the cops do, though one has to wonder throughout this whole movie, "Guilty of what?" (Apparently "Presumed Guilty" was the film's working title, and it might have been a better one for it.) There's no trace of what happened to Tye, no hint that he's either living or dead — certainly there's no body, and no one has any idea what might have happened to the body if Rachel (or someone else) murdered him. Rachel finds herself beset by her next-door neighbor from hell, town gossip DeeDee (Marcia Ann Burrs), as well as a freelance videographer who (like most of these "types" in movies) wears a Walter Winchell-style hat and seems to be modeling himself after the great gossip columnist of old, and whose schtick is to ambush Rachel and shove his camera in her face, demanding that she tell "the truth" about whatever is going on when she has no idea of what is going on. Rachel's only confidante is her long-time friend Jessica (Virginia Williams), who works at the local bar and who eagerly joins in the search for Tye, alive or dead. Once she realizes that the cops suspect her of either knocking off her husband or arranging her disappearance, Rachel hires an attorney, Dylan (Ryan Bittle, an unusually hunky actor for a Lifetime good guy), with whom she has an off-balance relationship because she's not convinced he thinks she's innocent and he tells her that doesn't matter; his job is to represent her interests whether she did anything criminal or not. "Marriage of Lies" isn't a great movie — it doesn't even reach the quality level of some of the Lifetime social-comment movies like "For the Life of a Child" or "Restless Virgins" — but on its own terms it's well made and well worth watching. Brian D. Young's script is coherent, relatively plausible and refreshingly unmelodramatic. Danny J. Boyle's direction is finely honed and refreshingly gimmick-free, and the acting, particularly April Bowlby's all-important performance as Rachel, is solidly professional and genuinely moving throughout.
