Toronto and NYFF preview. Married Life.

"[Director Ira] Sachs and [co-screenwriter Oren] Moverman cop to their influences (to these eyes, Married Life's obvious cinematic touchstones are the multifaceted melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with shadings of Ophuls, Hitchcock and Preminger), yet they never succumb to them," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "Rather, they understand the important ways in which art acts as a stimulus to life, and how cinema, an inherently two-dimensional form, can be revelatory, if never entirely explanatory, of human psychology."

"Chris Cooper is sublime, as always," writes David Poland. "He just isn't capable of walking through a film. Patricia Clarkson has become a true master of the camera. You can actually see her using the angles and light with her own instincts sometimes. Rachel McAdams finds yet another character to play who is completely different than what she has done before. But it is Pierce Brosnan who really struck me in the film."

Brosnan's "work as a committed bachelor who takes an interest in best friend Chris Cooper's mistress (Rachel McAdams) - and the performances of the other actors... - give Sachs' melodrama, set among people of privilege in post-war America, the precious distinction it needs," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

For Jürgen Fauth, this is "the first film at this year's New York Film Festival that I wish I had walked out of."

"Never mind... that the narration in Married Life is redundant or that it provides the would-be suspenseful crime drama with a playfully misdirected tone; the major issue is that Sachs appears to misunderstand the purpose of using voiceover as a storytelling device in which point of view is established," writes Christopher Campbell, who goes on at the Reeler to quote Sachs defending the use of the voiceover at Friday's press conference.

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2007 7:29 AM