MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Adults’: It’s Got Straying Power

“Consenting Adults” (citywide) could just as well be called “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” or even “The Wages of Sin.” A somewhat diverting but finally disappointing thriller, it is characterized by a premise even Pat Buchanan could love: If you so much as think about straying from the marital straight and narrow, all heck is sure to break loose.

Exhibit A are Richard and Priscilla Parker (Kevin Kline and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), married 14 years, parents of a gifted child who is conveniently away at school, and partners in an Atlanta company that produces commercial jingles for loutish, unappreciative businessmen.

Richard, a frustrated composer, writes the music, and Priscilla, the more practical of the two, takes care of the numbers to the point of falling asleep in bed over a particularly wearying balance sheet. Their life has settled into agreeable if not terribly exciting routines when, without warning, the Otises move in next door.

Their arrival is not announced by a polite knock but by Eddy Otis (Kevin Spacey) roaring out of the moving van on a hot motorcycle. An ex-insurance salesman now involved in financial advising (health clubs are out, drug rehab centers are in), Eddy is Mr. Excitement. Whether it’s flying his own plane or taking the helm of a sailboat, this man never met the gusto he didn’t grab for.

Oh yes. Eddy has a wife, Kay (Rebecca Miller). A rather attractive wife. At least to Richard, who could probably be knocked over with a feather when she sidles into the room in long blond hair and a slinky outfit. Turns out, Kay and Richard share a passion for music (she’s a burnt-out torch singer), while Eddy, who believes that “Money is like blood, if you want to live you need a lot of it pumping through the system,” finds that he and the practical Priscilla have a lot in common as well.

Suddenly the Otises and the Parkers are the fastest of friends, living fun-filled, adventurous lives that look like they’ve been lifted whole cloth from commercials for Club Med. But then comes the night when Eddy wonders if Richard would be willing to take this friendship stuff just a tad further than the Moral Majority would approve of.

Though audience members, who’ve been watching Richard drooling over Kay almost nightly out the back window of his house, will not have many doubts about what the final outcome will be, this heavy-breathing, mildly titillating, will-he-or-won’t-he stuff turns out to be the most entertaining part of “Consenting Adults,” and Spacey is a good part of the reason.

An actor at home in any part and any medium (witness his current and very different role in “Glengarry Glen Ross” and his Tony for Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers”), Spacey turns Eddy into the devil in white buck shoes, an energized, amusing presence that is as much fun to watch as it must have been to play. When Spacey is center-stage, “Consenting Adults” is at its high-class soap-opera best.

When Richard finally makes his fateful decision, however, it has unforeseen consequences (isn’t that always the case?), consequences that take “Consenting Adults” out of the amusing realm of movie moral dilemmas and into the tough world of the thriller.

There have been a spate of half-baked thrillers recently (“Whispers in the Dark,” “Final Analysis,” “White Sands,” to name some names) and “Consenting Adults” has a leg up on most of them. Its cast is first rate, down to excellent supporting performances from Forest Whitaker and E.G. Marshall, the dialogue in Matthew Chapman’s script is acceptable, and veteran Alan Pakula (“Presumed Innocent” was his most recent film) is a director comfortable with the concept of nuance.

The problem with “Consenting Adults” (rated R for sexuality, violence and language) is that though its setup is satisfactory, once its thriller elements kick in the excitement seems perversely to leak out of the film. Partly it’s because Spacey, the life of the party, is hardly on screen at all, but it is also because no one involved has found a way to inject interest in the film’s very traditional and predictable chain of events.

This trick is one Kenneth Branagh was able to pull off with “Dead Again,” but even Alfred Hitchcock, the master of the genre, no doubt got so tired of dark nights and blunt objects that he ended “North by Northwest” on the mock-heroic slopes of Mt. Rushmore. “Consenting Adults” is a very smooth and at times entertaining version of business as usual, which is nothing, unfortunately, to get very excited about.

‘Consenting Adults’

Kevin Kline: Richard Parker

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio: Priscilla Parker

Kevin Spacey: Eddy Otis

Rebecca Miller: Kay Otis

Forest Whitaker: David Duttonville

E.G. Marshall: George Gordon

Touchwood Pacific Partners I presentation, released by Hollywood Pictures. Director Alan J. Pakula. Producers Pakula, David Permut. Executive producer Pieter Jan Brugge. Screenplay Matthew Chapman. Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt. Editor Sam O’Steen. Costumes Gary Jones, Ann Roth. Music Michael Small. Production design Carol Spier. Art director Alicia Kaywan. Set decorator Gretchen Rau. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sexuality, violence, language).