BEFORE: Another Julianne Moore film tonight, with more mistrust and infidelity, from the looks of things. This is the only film on my schedule this week that was NOT Oscar-nominated in some fashion.
TCM's itinerary today covers Australia with "Captain Fury" and "The Sundowners", before moving on to Arizona and New Mexico for "Arizona", "In Old Arizona", "The Harvey Girls" and "Them!". I'm going to pick up "The Andromeda Strain" (to pair with "Logan's Run") and "Bless the Beasts and the Children" (to pair with "Born Free"), but I've seen both films before, so they don't affect my count. But I will be adding two more films tomorrow.
THE PLOT: A doctor hires an escort to seduce her husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though unforeseen events put the family in danger.
AFTER: I know I'm getting close to the end of February, with just 5 or 6 films left on the list that can qualify as romances - and then the whole genre is gone, much like horror films. The infidelity films are starting to get to me - I had the dream last night where I was breaking up with someone, though it was combined with the recurring dream where I'm setting up a booth at Comic-Con. I can't recommend that anyone do those two activities at the same time.
Tonight's film hinges on deception - one assumes that if a husband is having an affair, he would take great pains to hide it. But then, how does a wife distinguish that from his everyday behavior? It's an ongoing problem and an unanswerable question - so rather than confront the problem directly, people look for changes in routine, little lies that might be hiding bigger lies, text messages, secretive phone calls, etc.
(ASIDE: It's like this pain I have in my side. No, not a figurative one, a literal pain in my side, like a pulled muscle or something. How am I supposed to know when it's just a meaningless ache, and when it could signify some larger internal problem? At 43, I've gotten used to minor back pain, leg pain, etc. and I hate going to the doctor only to have him say that's it to be expected at that age, especially with the extra weight I'm carrying around, and by the way, I really should be eating more salad.)
In this film, we see a husband who is older, acts distant and might be on the verge of a midlife crisis - plus he's a professor, so he's around young female students, and he tends to flirt with waitresses and women in cafes. So his wife starts to wonder about his fidelity, and hires an escort to approach him. Because there's no possible way that scenario can spiral out of control....
And because she NEEDS to know, she requires updates from the young attractive escort, and because she's been neglected, she comes to regard these reports as the only way she can still feel close to her husband (though it seems to me there would be simpler solutions for this), so a seductive, destructive relationship begins to develop between the wife and the escort. It's like a very messed-up three-way (again, it seems there's an easier way to achieve this...).
Without giving it away, the ending seems like a cop-out. A tried-and-true method of wrapping things up, but it makes me feel that a more difficult resolution could have been more interesting. And I feel the film ending up trodding the same ground as thrillers like "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle", when it seemed at the start it would be more relationship-based than action-based.
As a point of fact (not really a nitpick point), the wife here is also a gynecologist. I suppose there's an important distinction between doctor-patient contact and sexy-time contact, but still - it's sex-adjacent contact with other people on a daily basis. And she seems to have such a cavalier attitude about sex when talking with her patients, yet she takes it so personal when she suspects her husband is cheating, so it seems like a bit of a disconnect.
Also starring Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Max Thieriot.
RATING: 5 out of 10 text messages
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