There is a sequence in Separate Lies in which a couple plays that game so familiar to all couples (except, perhaps, the most patriarchal). ”What do you want to do?” asks one. ”What do you want to do?” asks the other. And so it goes around.
There is a similar sequence in Woody Allen’s latest movie, Match Point, but there it is about a couple’s plans for the evening, as such exchanges often are: to go out or stay in? It is given ironic and dramatic force by the fact that we know the male half of the couple is desperate to see another woman. In the case of Separate Lies, this conversation is about a crime that could ruin the lives of all involved.
Separate Lies is the directorial debut of Julian Fellowes, a former actor who wrote the Oscar-winning script for Robert Altman’s brilliant Gosford Park. Here he adapts and updates a 1951 novel about adultery and death in the English countryside.
Tom Wilkinson plays a well-to-do lawyer, James Manning, who has a lovely house in the country; there he lives in peaceful contentment with his wife Anne (Emily Watson). When James isn’t busy clinching big-money deals in London, their life together is conditioned by cricket matches and drinks parties.
And then, just before one such party, a man riding a bicycle is knocked down near the Manning’s home. It is a hit-and-run accident; whoever was driving the fatal car does not own up, and the righteous James decides to do something about it. This begins the process of uncovering the corruption beneath the ideal surface of an apparently happy marriage, a successful life, and a lovely country lifestyle, all of which would be clear to us even if we hadn’t been told as much by a voice-over from James right at the start.
Separate Lies is reasonably gripping; it keeps twisting and turning as each character is slowly eviscerated. It doesn’t feel particularly new or fresh, though, which may have something to do with the 1951 source material, or the fact that the whole setting is somewhat old-fashioned. This is appropriate in that what’s at issue, at certain points, is what might be regarded as a set of old-fashioned values, but Fellowes leaves that issue hovering in the background rather than fully exploring it. The movie’s banal camerawork also makes it feel rather too much like a mid-level British TV series.
Wilkinson gives a solid performance as the rather stuffy James, though it’s hard to really feel for him — even when he’s trying to do the apparently decent thing, and even when his life is falling apart. (Is it because we want that face to be comic rather than serious?) Watson is twitchy and regretful as Anne, the wife, and one does pity her. Rupert Everett plays a scion of the local gentry, and perhaps it’s believable that he would appear to have just stepped off the plane from California, where he got a tan as well as some plastic surgery.
We aren’t given any such possible background on Everett’s character, so that’s just my speculation. What’s more important, though, is that (apart from his dripping-toffee accent) Everett as a screen presence just doesn’t ring true. I never thought there would be a film sequence more pathetically irksome than Debra Winger dying of cancer in Terms of Endearment, but here it is: Rupert Everett dying of cancer in Separate Lies. The main symptom of his terminal illness, it would appear, is an inability to shave. The tan is fine.