Separate Lies

Julian Fellowes, the distinguished writer of "Godsford Park", presents us with another civilized tale of self contained emotions. This time however, the ingredients are somehow at odds with each other and the strange taste that left in my palate indicates that, perhaps, it was removed from the oven a little too soon. I longed for Joseph Losey at the helm and Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and Alan Bates as the protagonists. Emily Watson is always marvelous but here, she doesn't have the kind of support she, as an actress or as a character, deserved and/or needed. Tom Wilkinson, as good as he is, doesn't have the layers of a Dirk Bogarde or James Mason. He is exactly what you get and Rupert Everett, who became a star overnight with Julian Mitchell's "Another Country" has taken a strange and puzzling road. His close ups are kind of frightening. His mouth has become the center of attention and not the kind of attention one would expect. It belongs to the villain in a horror movie. I noticed that already in his comedy with Madonna. I know, perhaps, all this sounds irrelevant but it conditioned my response to "Separate Lies" I wanted to be riveted and I wasn't.

"Separate Lies" is a veddy English take on "Unfaithful" and "Crash" crossed with a Ruth Rendell mystery about guilt and responsibility.

The setting is very smoothly established of a high-powered solicitor who works in the City, has a country house and an in town apartment and has everything ordered beautifully and under control, including his wife. The surroundings completely capture the mood. A sense of portent and uneasiness is only introduced with fast flashbacks to a car accident until Emily Watson as the wife starts showing some out of place hairs and breath.

The coincidences are a bit claustrophobically theatrical so that it almost feels like a stage play. For the first half the suspense and revelations keep our attention, but then the film just ducks it all and deteriorates into relationships that are so civilized as to be devoid of emotion or reason. I haven't read the book so don't know if director/adapter Julian Fellowes changed it.

This is the best Tom Wilkinson performance since "In the Bedroom." He holds the film together. He's used so often in films to fulfill the stereotype of a self-satisfied suburban or aristocratic executive that one forgets it can be done with subtlety and verve. This may be the first film that he gets to use so many four letter words with his own accent.

Rupert Everett is so distant and even repellent to every one that it's hard to see his appeal that is critical to the plot. I kept thinking who else could have been cast for at least some magnetism. While it is amusing to see him as a Milord in casual jeans, explained disdainfully that he's been living in America so long that he's practically become an American (a line I've heard in a couple of other Brit movies lately).

While we get a frisson of background on relationships that is supposed to help, it's not enough. All the background and relationships are revealed off screen through talky explication. We certainly can't tell in terms of how people relate. We have to take revelations for their word for it. The injection of old-fashioned Movie Star's Disease makes the characters' interactions get even phonier. And then suddenly there's narration that's unnecessary and jarring. While there's flashes of some action and emotion, this is drawing room drama. That stiff upper lip just gets plain annoying.

There was probably some symbolic significance to a Paris interlude that included a rendez-vous by the Guy de Maupassant statue but if so it was a long time coming for a not worth it punch line.

There's an amusing inside joke of a character watching "Monarch of the Glen" on the TV, as Fellowes was featured in that series.

Although this film is set amongst the sophisticated English upper classes it is a simple story of a couple torn asunder. It has a slightly dated air, being an adaptation of "A Way Through the Wood", a 1950 novel by Nigel Balchin (once hugely popular and now forgotten). Julian Fellowes, who despite an academy award for the script of "Gosford Park", has a somewhat anachronistic persona himself, wrote the script and directed (the latter for the first time). With the DVD version I saw there is a most illuminating audio commentary by Julian. His primary focus was on getting his characters right, and by and large he has succeeded. In this he was helped by two outstanding performances from Tom Wilkinson as James, the stitched up City lawyer, and Emily Watson as his attractive wife Anne. He also kept it short; the running time is only 80 minutes.

James and Anne have a town house in Chelsea and a comfortable former vicarage in Buckinghamshire. Anne is some years younger but they are childless. Outwardly they seem happy, but James, one of nature's moralists (unusual for a city lawyer), is a control freak. Just down the road is the aristocratic the Hon. William Buel, who is not one for middle-class morality, and he is more than happy to take advantage. But there's a complication, a road accident, in which an elderly cyclist is knocked over in a country lane by a ruthlessly driven Range Rover just like the Hon. Bill's. Soon James, Anne, Bill and the victim's widow (who happens to be James' and Anne's cleaner) are drawn in to a conspiracy to conceal what really happened. The primary focus is on the corrosive effect of all this on James and Anne's relationship.

The third person in this ménage a trios, Bill, is played by Rupert Everett. From the point of view of casting, his languid, superior manner is right for the part, yet somehow he doesn't quite get there. Partly this is because he is supposed to be sick for some of the time and he looks well when he is supposed to be sick, and vice-versa. The part seems underdeveloped. It is interesting that John Neville as Bill's father who has only one significant scene manages to establish his character beautifully in the time he has.

The world of five star hotels and superior restaurants is nicely evoked. As Julian Fellowes says in the audio commentary, these people are able to convince themselves that the Edwardian age still exists. At bottom though, the film is about what draws a couple together and what tears them apart. Nigel Balchin was going through a marriage break-up when he wrote the book, and Fellowes has made a good fist of conveying the atmosphere. As he says, his is a fairly free adaptation, but the central theme is the same.

I wish there were more films about middle aged people. The intellectual journey and the twists and turns of life's moral highway make interesting viewing. There seems to be a different standard of judgement on women who have extra marital affairs than on men. Amy Watson's hurtful and humiliating behaviour towards her husband seems to pass without comment. Reverse the roles and one could expect a torrent of condemnation towards the man. If she found her husband boring and judgmental she could could have told him so, left and waited for a no doubt large financial settlement upon divorce. The country and London scenes are wonderfully authentic and rich while the autumnal weather adds to the melancholy background superbly. The ending is perfect, so in tune with real adult life.

An old man is riding his bike down a village road when a car comes out of nowhere, strikes him down dead, and keeps driving. The rest of the film is spent discovering who hit him, why he was hit, and what consequences this murder will have on the rest of the village. Separate Lies is a very British movie indeed. I'm not saying that hit-and-run car accidents are a particularly British phenomenon, but the way everyone reacts to this tragedy is very British. Tom Wilkinson plays James Manning, a hard-working, respectable citizen with a "stiff-upper-lip" attitude towards tragedy. His wife Anne (Emily Watson), who is twenty years younger than her husband, is more emotional, more impulsive, and more prone to drama.

The man who really spices up life in this sleepy village is playboy millionaire William Bule, played by a deliciously devilish Rupert Everett (most American audiences will eternally remember him as Julia Roberts' gay friend who completely stole every scene in My Best Friend's Wedding). In Separate Lies, Everett is cruel, cold, and selfish, but he's an absolute blast on screen. No, it's not that exciting of a movie title (Separate Lies – how did they end up with that lame and forgettable title? Did they just not have a marketing team? Did they just now care about getting people to see this film?), but beyond the title is a heartbreaking drama about the power of forgiveness.