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Separate Lies   

Directed & Written by: Julian Fellowes
Starring: Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett, Linda Bassett, John Neville, David Harewood.
Country: UK

              


Three and a half SUVs

Reviewed by Hal Gray

The Right Stuff. 

The Brits are one tough people. They stay calm in the face of gut-wrenching matrimonial adversity and eventually come around to, if not quite understanding, the other chappie’s point of view, then accepting it with gracious aplomb. And then they carry on long after the rest of us will have sunk into a deep depression, killed the offending party, or ourselves.

Separate Lies—one would guess the title a tribute to Noel Coward’s Separate Lives—adds to the now pantheon of British theatre and film dedicated to domestic travails. It fits in rather well.

James and Anne have the perfect buttoned-down life. He’s a high-powered solicitor in London during the week and they move to the country house for the weekend. Probably in love and most certainly affectionate, they’re in cruise control.

There are some strains, however. Anne doesn’t have much to do, which on one hand is a good thing because she’s a bit spacey, often confused, and not up to running two households, at least by James' standards. One never finds out why Anne is this way, whether it’s her natural bearing or her circumstances that make her so flighty. This really is the only rub between them, but a big enough rub for Anne to pursue a titled scoundrel, William, who catches her eye at a cricket match. They begin an affair.

The affair may have stayed hidden for quite some time, but a vehicle, very much like William’s SUV, kills a cyclist. With sure-footed dramatic story telling, this inciting incident unfolds. A scratch on the SUV leads James to suspect William of the deed and to a whole rash of other unpleasant discoveries, the affair among them. Soon the three of them are involved in a cover up to evade the unpleasant consequences.

This is the delicious heart of Separate Lies. People having to make choices when moral and ethical beliefs run smack into self-preservation.

The ancestor of films like Separate Lies is of course playright-director Harold Pinter, who’s taken the drawing room theatre of Shaw and Coward into the bedroom. Writer-director Julian Fellowes' script is inherently Pinteresque in tone, which is fitting indeed as Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature this month.

Tom Wilkinson hits no false notes as James, the decent, but detail-oriented, A-personality. His insistence that the right thing be done is admirable, which makes his hypocrisy all the more piquant when he has to shift course in an instant. The tension he feels between these conflicting emotions never leaves him. Emily Watson strikes the right stance as Anne. Ditsy perhaps, but aware of a greater ethical standard when it’s pointed out to her. She finds strength when others fail. Rupert Everett as William is the perfect shit. A key, and perhaps under appreciated role, is delivered by Linda Bassett as the housekeeper and the wife of the killed cyclist.

Separate Lies seems familiar, but it’s so well directed, shot, acted and spare, that it receives high marks. And a half a mark for making the SUV the thematic villain. 
 

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