Separate Lies - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'Separate Lies': An intricate chamber piece

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lies beget lies in the sturdy British drama "Separate Lies." And the very first one comes early on as Anne Manning (Emily Watson) bids farewell to her husband, James (Tom Wilkinson), as he heads off to his Very Important Job in London.

The pair look picture-perfect — a handsome couple with the unruffled calm and complacent entitlement of the awfully rich. Except, it's all empty show. Especially for Anne, who's taken a lover — the well-off and worthless Bill Bule (Rupert Everett), whose dissolute manner makes him instantly dislikable.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

'Separate Lies'

The verdict: This stiff-upper-lip Brit drama isn't exactly a JOLLY good show, but a good show nonetheless.

Director: Julian Fellowes
Starring: Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett, Hermione Norris, Linda Bassett
Run time: 87 minutes
Release date: Sept. 16, 2005
Rating: R for language including some sexual references.
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Not even Anne really likes him. But, as she later explains to her husband, that's one reason she's with him. He doesn't give a fig about her. It's ... easier, she says.

But adultery isn't the stickiest wicket here. Murder is. Or rather, the sticky matter of a hit-and-run accident along the pleasant back roads of the Mannings' country paradise. Who is to blame? Who is willing to lie? And for whom? And for how long?

Wilkinson's cuckold has kindness in him. And he's blindly in love with his wife. Yet he can't stop himself from making prickly little critical comments like, "Are you going to use that plate," after Anne has spent the past 15 minutes meticulously preparing their dinner.

That's another reason she's taken a lover she doesn't even love. "I fail every test you set for me," she says, half-resentfully, half-pleadingly, to her husband. First-time director Julian Fellowes (he won a writing Oscar for "Gosford Park") gives the movie a cool, drizzly feel. He also capably conveys the cozy country life of cocktails and cricket enjoyed by the Mannings and their "set."

However, the movie is also somewhat distant, somehow aloof — though that may come with the sociological territory. Everett is exactly right as the bounder who can't even be bothered to be nice anymore. In a carefully nuanced performance in a difficult role, Watson sometimes recalls Isabelle Huppert, another actress capable of playing selfish, amoral women who still retain a tenuous hold on an audience's good will.

But Wilkinson is the focal point of this intricate chamber piece. As a man who wants to do the right thing when there may not be a right thing to do, he has an immense dignity, coupled with an even greater sadness. The center no longer holds and he's as lost as any of Peter Pan's boys.