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Fatal Attraction In the Bedroom
The idea is straight from the Penthouse "Forum":
Your everyday housewife, still with a knock-out body after
ten years of marriage, does something "I never thought
would never happen to me." This being Adrian Lyne, director
of 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and 1994 Razzie
Winner Indecent Proposal, it all starts innocently
enough. Connie Sumner, breezing through Soho, gets knocked
over in a gale. She skins her knee and is helped out by a
handsome Hispanic bookseller named Paul Martel. Connie comes
up to his apartment for band-aids and coffee, and perhaps
to buy a book of poetry or two; next thing you know, Paul
is Paying It Forward—judging by Connie's yelps, I'd say
he's paying it about eight inches forward.
Why is Connie so anxious to jump in the sack with a mysterious
loner, especially one who resembles a porno pool boy? Well,
for starters, Connie's marriage is one of those flat suburban
co-inhabitations that imply an over-settling since the couple's
hippie days. Connie's husband Edward is soft as a down pillow:
He speaks barely above a whisper, helps his son with his homework,
and takes a genuine interest in his wife's charity work. In
fact, Unfaithful works best when Diane Lane and Richard
Gere explore this dynamic of their characters. They create
a couple that I imagine would grow to be Tom Wilkenson and
Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom, only this time Diane
Lane would be the playful one, with Richard Gere as the uptight
pragmatist. Adrian Lyne shoves the camera right into their
faces and lets them search for the expressions that define
a relationship of failing communication. This is Richard Gere's
best performance in years; his pacifism gives Edward a gentleness
that is endearing, yet it's easy to see how the act would
grow old on Connie—and it is an act: Edward has a tendency
to boil over at work, much to the dismay of his wife. Perhaps
it's this fire that led Connie to him in the first place.
And as for Connie, the natural screen presence of Diane Lane
is a perfect fit: a warm, homely persona begging unleash itself
on the male id.
It's all for not, though. Olivier Martinez turns Paul, the
sexy French bookseller, into an impression of a guy playing
a sexy Hispanic. In other words, he's a couple quarts low
of machismo. He seems confused by what to do with Diane Lane.
He invites her up to the apartment, obviously trying to get
her into bed, and the best he can do is offer her a trip through
his maze of books to read a couple lines of poetry. If anything,
Diane Lane is too sexy for him: She's very warm and
sensual, while Olivier plays the role like a bandit. I couldn't
figure out why a woman as savvy as Connie would fall for this
guy. Relatively speaking, John Redcorn from "King of
the Hill" is less of a stereotype. And we have to deal
with some of the worst lines of the year: "Your eyes
are so beautiful. You should never shut them. You should sleep
with your eyes open." coupled with "There's no such
thing as a mistake. There's what you do and what you don't
do." Goodness, that is persuasive. Martinez gives the
impression that he's reading his lines off cue cards, and
the director had to break them down into six word sentences
just so he could remember them. I began to think it best if
Horatio Sans and Jimmy Fallon's mariachi band would show up,
screaming "You're too sexy, Olivier! Too sexy!"
William Broyles, Jr.'s screenplay (Cast Away, Planet
of the Apes) tries to go after the idea that underneath
Connie's kind mother lays a masochist. Edward has repressed
his violence at home, which has drained their sex life, and
somehow Paul senses that Connie is turned on by his aggressiveness.
He asks her to hit him hard in the face, and at one point
he even rapes her—it would be a rape, I guess, if Connie
didn't embrace it about half way through. If you can't already
tell, this movie, like the entire Adrian Lyne canon, hates
women. Morally, Paul is little more than a Faustian bargain
with a five o'clock shadow and washboard abs, a Mephistopheles
of machismo. Connie bites the apple and basically becomes
irrelevant to the story: Later, we're made to cheer for Edward's
revenge fantasy after he goes crazy, a justification of repressed
male rage that almost equates Connie's cheating with Satan
himself. Without giving away too much of the plot, the character-driven
first half of the film (much of it dedicated to the wonderful
scenes of Lane and Gere tiptoeing around the truth), gives
way to a plot-driven second half that resembles the overwrought
histrionics of In the Bedroom. If you didn't buy the
third act of that film (which neither JimmyO or I did), then
Unfaithful will be downright laughable.
But even more laughable is the Obvious Symbolism, as if the
director and screenwriter gave these descriptions because
they couldn't sort out the story. Connie's full name is "Constance."
Edward's business is a "Security" truck company.
Paul takes Connie to see erotic French films. And the list
goes on. I'm tempted to rate this film higher solely because
Diane Lane is such an underutilized actress. She throws everything
into this role, and had this character been in a different
film with a different director, it would be worthy of talking
about come awards time. Perhaps I'm being too hard on Lyne;
he seems to know how effective Lane is in the role. Her initial
romp with Paul is told through flashback on the train ride
home, the sex intercut with her reactions to what she's done.
Lane passes through ecstasy, regret, laughter, guilt, embarrassment,
and empowerment all within four minutes, without a single
word. It's great stuff, and Richard Gere is as good as he's
been in years. But in the final analysis, the movie is still
an almost archetypal instance of Adrian Lyne misogyny, so
it gets the following pitch:
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