There's this old joke:
A guy goes away for a while. He has his brother take care of his cat while he's gone. When he comes home, the brother says to him, "Your cat is dead." "Jesus!" replies the guy, "that's no way to tell me something like that. You have to start off gently, like, the window upstairs was open, you noticed the cat was gone, the cat must have gone out the window, he climbed a tree, he fell off, and well, he died. You know? Anything else happen while I was gone?"
"Well...mom went out the window..."
Separate Lies is a lot like that joke. Bad things change to worse things as the 3 leads get caught up in a terribly British soap opera. The entire soapy spectacle is elevated by the actors playing in this little drama, mainly Tom Wilkinson and the lovely Emily Watson. Rupert Everett is the third part of this triangle but he plays such an unmitigated prick that he's hard to like, which I guess is the hallmark of good acting, innit?
Wilkinson plays James Manning, a high-powered London solicitor married to Anne (Watson). They seem to be the perfect couple, the older, successful man consumed by work and his young, beautiful wife. But she's dissatisfied with the way he treats her, how he's always unknowingly testing her. Her attention wanders to young Bill Bule (Everett), an indifferent and amoral upper-crust Brit. And one night an accident happens, killing an innocent man, and all three of them are drawn into a web of lies and deception.
I probably would have normally passed this by except for the presence of both Wilkinson and Watson. I loved Wilkinson in In The Bedroom and Batman Begins and I love Watson in everything she does. Her luminous blue eyes and her girlish face exude a quiet sort of sexuality that might go missed if you passed her on the street. There's just something innately sexy about her, and I know she's definitely not known as the sexy type, she's a serious, respected actress. (I'm not questioning that side of her. I'm just saying her sexiness adds to it.)
Lies is a bit of a weeper even when one of the three gets their karma reajusted in the end. It's one of those little morality plays that the Brits are particularly good at, and this one is no exception. You can chart the whole progress from "there was an accident" onward, just like that old chestnut of a joke, mentioned above. The moral of the story is people make choices, some good, some bad, but all of those choices have their consequences.
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