Separate Lies - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Separate Lies': Erosive effects of deceit

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

The marriage of James and Anne Manning is like a sweater with a single loose thread. Once you begin to pull on it, the whole thing soon unravels.

Hastened by a deceit, a careless car accident and numerous falsehoods in an attempt to cover matters up, their entire existence crumbles in Julian Fellowes' directorial debut, Separate Lies. It is a very British, stiff-upper-lip-in-the-face-of-adversity drama, based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, but one that slowly and inexorably draws us into its web.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

'Separate Lies'

The verdict: Affluent British lives fall apart in this muted domestic drama set against a crime story.

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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Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of the even more British Gosford Park, again explores the personal treacheries lurking among the affluent, but with a decidedly less Agatha Christie approach this time.

Still, the Mannings (Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson) do seem to have the ideal life, as least when viewed from afar. He is a successful London solicitor, she is a housewife who putters about their well-appointed country home, while leaving the heavy chores to their loyal cleaning lady, Maggie.

But look a little closer and you see that James treats Anne like a subservient law clerk, making demands of her and scowling over the way she carries them out. No wonder we can see the tension coursing through her as she chops vegetables for a salad, shown in ominous close-up by Fellowes, just to toss in an unnerving Hitchcockian touch.

And no wonder she has taken a lover, even the lackadaisical Bill Bule (Rupert Everett), a terminally bored gentleman of leisure. Anne, a woman with a strong sense of needing to own up to her mistakes, confesses her infidelity to James one day in the middle of a casual conversation. Worse, however, is the incident of a car sideswiping a man on a bicycle, the first evidence of tragic events disrupting this idyllic rural town at the beginning of the film.

The bicyclist was Maggie's husband, and Anne and Bill were in the car, after one of their afternoon trysts. When the man dies from the collision, a police detective starts nosing around, so clearly the lies must escalate.

The clues start piling up — Maggie claims to be an eyewitness to the hit-and-run incident, James offers an alibi to Bill, the car's damage is quickly fixed, but not before it is seen by a gas station mechanic. Yet while Fellowes seems to be writing a Columbo episode, what he is really after is the toll of such dark incidents on the human heart. Personal betrayal trumps criminality in this hermetically sealed world that is about to creak open.

Were Separate Lies made in Hollywood, it would have more bombastic touches at regular intervals. But Fellowes understands that lives crumble in small, simple moments and the film is better for that wisdom.