A Good Marriage

I say this knowing that, at times, I've been this guy: I hate "the book was better than the movie" guy. Yes, the palette of the imagination is limitless compared to what can be done on the screen. Yes, books can explore characters internally in ways movies can't. But sometimes, a movie can reign in a book's tendency to wander and explore narrative nooks and crannies that only serve to waste time and bloat page counts. Really, there is no objective evidence one is better than the other. It's all personal taste. I say all that as a precursor to having to utter the dreaded phrase here: the book was better than the movie. And it's not the fault of the two principal actors here, Joan Allen and Anthony LaPaglia. I think they have a sweet chemistry that feels like a couple married 25 years. They have inside jokes and routines and are playfully flirty in the way only people who've been together for decades can be. Everybody else in the movie are bit players, but the two leads hold up their end. And the story itself is a good one. What if you found out your spouse of 25 years was a serial killer? You have an idyllic life; he's successful, you run a successful side-business, you have two grown kids, one is getting married and the other is hitting new levels of success in his field ... and here's this new information that will blow it all up. If she tells the cops, her kids may hate her, the business will be ruined, the family destroyed, and the cops will wonder how she didn't know anything about it all this time. But not telling means denying the families of the murdered justice, and living with a monstrous secret. And then there's just reconciling the spouse you've loved all these years with being a monster. There's a compelling story to be told there, of a woman's inner struggle to figure out how to handle this, and this is where the movie completely falls down. The struggle with this revelation is largely internal, and the book is able to explore this in depth. The weight of conscience and doing the right thing versus the splash damage doing the right thing would create and wanting to protect her children is something that is easy to get across in a written narrative. It's all imaginary, so there's a ton of ways to explore it. But movies are a visual medium. Sure, you could be lazy and have voice-over to approximate internal thought, but, ugh, that's just terrible. The movie decides that, rather than finding a solution, it'll just ignore the problem. After Darcy finds out, and after Bob finds out she knows, they have a couple of conversations, come to a deal on how to deal with it (he buries the evidence and promises to never do it again, she never tells, they never speak of it again), and that's it. The book shows how she struggles after this decision; the movie does not. She runs the side business. She does laundry. She talks to her daughter about wedding plans. And not once, in all of that, does the movie show Darcy struggling with her decision. She just goes on with her life, with this murderous pink elephant in the room nobody is acknowledging. This narrative choice drags the movie down. It's supposed to be a character study, and instead, it becomes a Lifetime movie with the occasional swear word. It gives you no reason to sympathize with Darcy's internal turmoil. It just chugs along, showing daily life, until the out of the blue resolution to the problem. This is another failing compared to the book, as this resolution is teased and justified with the ongoing moral dilemma that is illustrated. Here, because there's a good 45 minutes of virtually nothing in terms of character development, the resolution is jarring and out of place with what we've seen so far. A good twist has bread crumbs you can see in retrospect; this does not. All this adds up to a movie that is never terrible or offensive, but it is ineffective at what it's trying to do. It's the kind of movie you watch and you forget. All the good acting in the world can't save a movie that seems unwilling to tell its own story.