Full commitment to ‘Married Life’

Directing Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdams in the stylish film noir “Married Life,” which opens Friday, Ira Sachs quickly discovered that his actors were “going for emotional broke with the material.”

“Married Life,” which Sachs adapted with Oren Moverman from John Bingham’s “Five Roundabouts to Heaven,” is a pulp thriller set in 1949 that has helpings of dark humor and romance and a few plot twists.

Cooper plays the long-married Harry, who decides he must murder his wife (Clarkson) when he opts to leave her for a young widow (McAdams). His rationale is that he loves her too much to watch her suffer after he’s gone. But Harry’s plans don’t quite work out after he introduces his mistress to his best friend, perennial bachelor Richard (Brosnan).

“The story is driven by four characters, each of whom has an incredible desire to change their lives at the same time,” says Sachs. “I think what kind of makes the film work is that there are a lot of twists and turns in the story because each of them keeps knocking up against what the other one wants. That’s what throws the whole story off continually.”

Though the action is nearly 60 years ago, Sachs says, “we tried to think of 1949 as if it was the present. At the end of the day, you build sets, you costume actors and you create a world. . . . I think once we said ‘1949,’ we stopped talking about it. For the actors, they didn’t really have to think about it, the world was there and they just had to inhabit it.”

And they did, ferociously. “I think you had four actors who were incredibly ambitious emotionally with the material,” he says, “and I think, within that, they were acting -- for them -- like they were in a Cassavetes movie or a Bergman film.”

Sachs read countless mysteries until he found “Five Roundabouts to Heaven.”

The British Bingham, says Sachs, was a true renaissance man -- a mystery writer and a member of MI5, the British intelligence and security agency.

“He was John Le Carre’s mentor in MI5 and the character of Smiley is based on John Bingham,” the filmmaker says. “And if you think of Smiley and Harry, the character Chris Cooper plays, you see the similarity between the troubled husband and a spy in the sense that there are all of these multiple lives.”

-- Susan King