Separate Lies review

After his well-deserved success with the screenplay of Robert Altman's Gosford Park, as well as his subsequent best-selling novel Snobs, Julian Fellowes begins his directorial career with a film based on Nigel Balchin's 1951 novel A Way Through the Woods. While it's placed in a contemporary setting, the material will be familiar to fans of the writer/director, dealing as it does with the moral complexities of the class system in Britain. However, the end result is less than satisfying, hitting a note somewhere between a Jackie Collins novel and a pedestrian ITV drama.

Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson play James and Anne Manning, a happily married upper middle class couple. James is a successful international lawyer, and Anne his domestic goddess wife. With a flat in London and a beautiful house in the country, the pair seem to have it all.

This apparently idyllic existence is shattered by two events: the death of their housekeeper's husband in a mysterious car crash, and the arrival in town of the dashing Bill Bule (Rupert Everett), an aristocratic local playboy whom Anne is bowled over by at the village cricket match. They begin an affair, and when a detective begins to pry into everyone's whereabouts at the time of the crash, James begins to suspect that Anne may not be the perfect housewife after all.

The film brings to mind both DePalma's Bonfire of the Vanities, namely the way in which the rich and powerful seem to have a different perspective on guilt, as well as Wilkinson's excellent In the Bedroom which similarly dealt with the consequences of a tragic event on a seemingly happy couple. It's a lot better than the first, but nowhere near as good as the second.

This is largely due to the unconvincing and frequently one-dimensional aspect of both the characters and the situation they find themselves in. It's simply too much of a leap of faith to invest much belief in either of these: Everett's character is far too clichéd, and the guilt of the rich comes across as cold and unlikeable. While the technical credits are generally good, the direction lacks depth: scenes involving James and his secretary at work are guffaw-inducing, while the final ten minutes of the film seem tacked on and melodramatic. Considering that the whole thing runs less than ninety minutes this is something of a disappointment.

All of the actors give decent enough performances, but you feel that this is not much of a stretch for them, given the work they have all done in the past. Fellowes hasn't quite lived up to the reputation he has created over the last few years, but perhaps the blame can be apportioned more to the source material, which now seems somewhat dated.

Paul Hurley