Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: Married Life, at a theater not near you

I just got back from a two-week vacation in Colorado, which was wonderful.  We did tons of hiking,  toured a gold mine, and got really sunburned while panning for gold in a mountain stream.  It never occurs to me to pack sunblock, because around here it's so rare to see that round yellow thing in the sky.  If I ever vacation someplace like Tunisia, I will die of UV poisoning within 24 hours.

One of the perks of sojourning in a populous city was getting to see Married Life in the theater.

Now, unfortunately, I wasn't able to give Married Life the full concentration it so richly deserved, because that afternoon I was sweating bullets over a very, very critical and potentially life-changing phone call (which, sure enough, arrived after the movie started and made me rush out into the lobby, but fortunately I was back in my seat before David's big scene).  Even so, I enjoyed it.

I can understand why reviews have been mixed - it's a film that can't decide whether to be black comedy or film noir, and frequently flinches at the awfulness/absurdity of its own premise.  Each of the four main characters has an interior life that contradicts his or her exterior: the cool, suave ladies' man who unexpectedly finds he wants to settle down, the straight-arrow executive concealing murder in his heart, the vivacious blonde bombshell who craves domesticity, the "ordinary" housewife with lustful physical appetites that can only be satisfied by the attentions of a slightly amoral ginger-haired writer.  (John O'Brien, David's character, is introduced as an "unpublished fiction writer", which I found absolutely hilarious.  That's like being an "unelected politician".)

To me, it was interesting to see Chris Cooper playing a romantic lead.  Usually he plays hard-bitten coal-mining dads and other manly-man roles.  Here, his character had to walk a subtle tightrope between being squishy-hearted enough to care about not hurting his wife, and hard-hearted enough to off her.  Patricia Clarkson was also amazing - she played her part with spunky good humor.

Okay, so now to the important stuff: how does John O'Brien fit into all of this?   His character is verbally referenced early in the movie, by way of introduction, but we don't actually see him until about an hour into the film.  At that point, David is on screen for about ten minutes.  It's one of the most hilariously awkward scenes in the film:  Richard (Pierce Brosnan), peering through the window of his friend's cabin, accidentally witnesses his best friend's wife (Patricia Clarkson) getting herself loved up by a bare-chested writer bearing the sinewy remnants of a mighty Spartan training regime.  O'Brien pretty much skips the foreplay and goes right for second base on the cabin couch.   (In the immortal words of Phil Rizzuto in Paradise By The Dashboard Light: "He's out.  No, he's safe!  Safe at second base!  This kid really makes things happen out there.")

At some point (spots had started swimming before my eyes, and I lost track of time momentarily) John O'Brien spots Richard standing on the porch and invites him in.  The three of them perch politely in the living room pretending that nothing just happened.  John breaks the silence by requesting some cookies.  As an unbiased fan, one must give huge credit to David's light touch and sense of comic timing for leavening the scene.

David is also in a second, smaller scene at the end, playing charades with a group of rowdy, happy partygoers.  I won't spoil the scene by revealing the phrase he's acting out, but I will give you a hint: he's miming playing the maracas.  And wearing the most adorably kicky 1940s sweater vest.

There's also a glimpse of David in another scene, but I can't talk too much about it without giving away the ending twist.   (Oh, all right...Rosebud was his sled, and Darth Vader is his father.  Happy now?)

One other thing that struck me while watching this movie (because the set designers took such pains with the period detail): wallpaper has pretty much gone extinct, hasn't it?  Do you know anyone who's voluntarily put up wallpaper in the last 10 years?  I don't mean those cute little 12" rubber ducky borders that new parents put around the walls of their nurseries, I mean honest-to-god flocked, flowery, viney, peely, crawling-with-claustrophic-patterns wallpaper.  Whenever people buy a new house, the very first thing they do is gasp at the horror of the wallpaper, then start heating up the electric steamer and sharpening the scrapers.  My 81-year-old neighbor has lived in the same house ever since he got married, and has never done any interior renovations.  Inside, it's like a museum of 1930s wall treatments.  The original owners were so in love with wallpaper, they even cut out butterflies from the pattern and glued them onto every light switch they could find.

The living room of my sister's house was sheathed in a heavy grasscloth wallpaper that the cat loved -- LOVED -- to sharpen her claws on.  By the time she moved, the grass fibers on the lower half of the wall had been plucked and unravelled into a sort of bushy cloud.  It looked like a vertical savannah.  She had to take hedge clippers to it.

My childhood bedroom had avocado-green wallpaper with little white tulips on it that, if you stared at them long enough with your eyes slightly unfocused, the tulip pattern would appear to pop out from the wall and float, shimmering, on top of itself.  It was like one of those "Magic Eye" drawings.  (Try doing that with paint!)

Wallpaper's OK, but it's like getting a tattoo.  You have to find a pattern you'd want to stare at for the rest of your life.  Even John O'Brien wallpaper would be pushing it.