Quid Pro Quo & Married Life (2008)
One of the least appetizing prospects in the theatre is the identity-free little picture that always draws a few obligatory positive notices, normally from people who either pity it or give it a pass because they can’t find anything exactly wrong with it. People can’t find much wrong with these non-films because there isn’t much wrong - but there isn’t much else either. Give me a big trashy cash-in any day; give me yet another no-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre clone. Hell, even give me a Michael Bay film, at least they have a sense of their casual immorality and play by their own rules accordingly, confidently. A picture driven solely by money isn’t an honorable picture, but we can at least understand it - it has a sense of purpose. The quaint little “indie” picture (the term “indie” of course having largely become meaningless) that strives for little other than critical and/or self-praise is the height of cinematic dawdling - they’re quickly forgotten, they please no one, and they usually, in their desperation to please, betray even themselves. Quid Pro Quo and Married Life are two recent examples.
Of the two, Quid Pro Quo is the lesser picture, but it’s not as irritating as Married Life, which is a missed opportunity. Quid Pro Quo suffers from a breakout of good intentions – tedious but forgivable. Married Life is more dispiriting - it’s another of those films, like American Beauty, that opens as a sort of domestic thriller-tragicomedy only to end as just another picture that buys the hypocrisy it initially claims to be lampooning. There’s a potentially promising joke buried in Married Life: that the picture’s narrator, Pierce Brosnan, slowly sells himself on the life he detests as he relives it for the audience, but that’s squandered in favor of the usual sentimentality.
Married Life’s opening hour has a poker-face devotion to the falseness and the ennui and the tedium that’s amusing, for awhile. Chris Cooper is a comfortable middle-class drone called Harry Allen, who decides the only humane way to dump his wife (Patricia Clarkson) for his mistress (Rachel McAdams) is to kill her – divorcing her would compromise her sense of purpose; murder allows her to remain an untarnished idol of domestic usefulness. One could accuse Cooper of being overly familiar with this specie of unsympathetic, purposeful mannequin, and one would be right, but Cooper has yet to run out of variations – his confidence in his character’s interior drive, and refusal to play to the audience - to court sympathy - still draws you in.
Married Life is Brosnan’s though. Brosnan may have been saddled with a few of the weakest James Bonds in the series, but they refined his timing and ease with himself (age and experience have similarly affected Richard Gere). Brosnan has always appeared ludicrously debonair; but over the last decade he’s informed those looks and that who-me?-faux-effortless-self-entitlement with a contemptuous inner-satire that just about always exceeds the films themselves. (Hugh Grant also has a similar charisma. A picture teaming Grant with Brosnan and Gere, directed by Alexander Payne, could be some sort of comic masterpiece.) But Brosnan has nothing to play here and no memorable lines - that he manages to make as much of an impression in Married Life as he does is a testament to his movie-star command.
The women, as usual, don’t fair as well, and I’m especially beginning to worry about Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson is a talented actress, an even stronger, livelier personality, but her recent career resurgence has led to little more than predictable supporting parts in predictable, marginal movies, the non-films. More filmmakers and more actresses (like Clarkson, and Julianne Moore and Jennifer Connelly and Charlize Theron) need to accept that women mustn’t necessarily suffer for their art – they don’t have to be bleached or crying or drug taking, or hidden under layers of hypocrisy, or losing their children, to achieve cinematic transcendence. (Watching these sorts of pictures triggers an even stronger longing than usual for Hal Ashby and Robert Altman.) Here’s hoping that Rachel McAdams – sharp in Red Eye, Mean Girls and The Family Stone, doesn’t follow suit – we need more breezy comediennes who refuse to carry the sins of the world on their shoulders.
I haven’t figured out whether Vera Farmiga is an actress yet or not, but I’m thinking there may (at least) be a 1980s Nic Cage freakster dying to leap out of the largely thankless roles she’s been given thus far. Farmiga’s wife in Running Scared was “the wife”, but Farmiga, with her wide-deep-eyes that could potentially swallow you whole and her siren’s body and her topsy-turvy, kinda perverse presence, had a spunk beyond the script’s call of duty. Farmiga was lost in Breaking and Entering and The Departed, those parts were constructs – but she still managed to avoid embarrassment. Farmiga needs her Vampire’s Kiss, and Quid Pro Quo, with a premise that’s suggestive of an early Cronenberg picture, could’ve been it. Unfortunately, the writer-director Carlos Brooks, tackling a group of more unusual than usual fetishists, is stuck navigating between exploitive and redemptive, and cancels himself out. Farmiga has nothing once again. Nick Stahl, the proper lead of the picture, has even less. One watches Quid Pro Quo and wonders, as one wonders with many non-films, what drove its creator to create it – the mystery driving the mystery of the picture is unintentional and off-camera.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Nice review. I always liked Brosnan and wished he’d be given the chance to do Bond the Fleming way which he would have done better. But he is funny and that Hugh Grant team up sounds good. Call Payne!
September 21st, 2008 at 6:11 am
I disliked QUID PRO QUO intensely, so your own well-written treatment for the most part, is music to my ears. I haven’t seen A MARRIED LIFE just yet, though.
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Yeah, I’m with you Christian. Brosnan doing real Bond could’ve really been something. Thanks as always Sam.