Review: Married Life (3/5); Cass (1/5)

Married Life
Ira Sachs):
Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, Rachel McAdams.
Running time: 90 minutes.

Whatever it is about Rachel McAdams’ Kay – those doe eyes, that bottle-blonde hair – it isn’t her personality that draws Chris Cooper’s fiftysomething Harry into her bed, and into a plot to murder his wife. McAdams barely treads water alongside pros such as Cooper and Patricia Clarkson. Though Pierce Brosnan ups his game, ironing out those lethargic creases. He adopts as narrator the plum snidery of George Sanders. His Richard is best pal to Harry. He too wants Kay as his mistress and gets on just fine with Harry’s wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson), whom Harry would prefer to kill than break her heart. But while Harry plots, he’s in for a wake-up call. Ira Sachs previously directed Forty Shades of Blue and there too you could detect a sensibility that allows for more sophistication in the battleground between men and women. When it comes to sexual desire, his females have equal billing, even though his male characters can’t quite see this until too late. Clarkson here is majestic and understated. The scenes are simple and organic; the cast allowed time to bloom. Some neat twists turn into suspense, and the bright 1950s melodrama belies the murky shadows of noir. But it doesn’t hold. Sachs’ carefully tended cynicism about married life gives way to a soppy sentimentalism, a rolling thunder cloud that dissolves before the clap of thunder.

Cass
(Jon S Baird):
Nonso Anozie, Nathalie Press, Leo Gregory, Gavin Brocker.
Running time: 108 minutes

This film deserves a beating. It is the true story of football hooliganism, but more particularly a chap called Cass Pennant. He’s a black Jamaican baby adopted by a white woman in east London. He’s bullied and ridiculed, so he grows up angry, see? This anger needs an outlet, so the towering black man (played awkwardly by Nonso Anozie) heads up the famous white-skinned ICF, notorious thugs who did battle on and off the terraces in the name of West Ham FC. Most famous moment: baseball-batting the inhabitants of a Newcastle working man’s club. Thatcher declares hooligans will go to jail, and Cass is the first in the clanger. He becomes a changed man only for his past to come a-haunting. The story is stuffed with over-earnest leaf-turning flimflam. And though it appears to be a true story, Cass appears to have led a life that more closely resembles Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Joe Pesci’s infamous “Funny, how?” scene is delivered here almost word for word. Legend has it Orson Welles watched John Ford’s Stagecoach 40 times before he made Citizen Kane. Judging by the thoroughly ham-fisted staging of this drama, not to mention his inability to direct actors, Jon S Baird appears to have fallen asleep halfway through his first viewing of Goodfellas and somnambulated his way through the entire shoot.