Married Life

When asked to define love in Married Life, Clarkson, as always beyond naïveté, replies, “Sex.” It’s a great moment, and while Clarkson’s character does expound further, you can feel her candor shuddering through the rest of Sachs’s feisty domestic drama. Set in the final autumn before the 1950s, Life is totally committed to a demystification of period moviemaking. Codes of formality still assert themselves: Wives make coffee on demand, and husbands are slaves to the grind. But this is also a film in which a rakish bachelor, Richard (Brosnan), can flirt openly with a widow, and his best friend, Harry (the superb Cooper), can decide to leave his wife because he’s not totally “happy.” How Harry decides to go about this—a murder by poisoning—places Married Life in the tradition of Hitchcockian melodrama, a convention that these interesting, raw performers don’t seem quite as committed to.