Be careful which elegant steed you choose to place your trust in for the racy, nasty British whodunit “Separate Lies.”
If you judge too soon and pick the wrong pony, you’ll be out of the running and watching from the sidelines instead of settling in to the rich atmosphere.
Will you bet on the smarmy middle-aged barrister (Tom Wilkinson), who morally condemns his wife for using the wrong serving plate when it appears certain he is bedding his own secretary?
Or take the pre-race favorite, the wife (Emily Watson), who cringes in servitude and glows with appeal, but who may have more cause than a cold husband to be so weepy all the time.
Perhaps the dark horse, the reckless playboy living next door (Rupert Everett), who flirts with anything that moves while holding true to some vague principles we can’t quite see?
It’s an absorbing ride to the finish with this stable of characters. Writer-director Julian Fellowes last lent his pen to the Academy Award-winning script for “Gosford Park,” a rich period mystery directed by Robert Altman. Fellowes knows his British classes, no matter what century they inhabit. With “Separate Lies” he brings a modern sensibility to the deception, adapted from the Nigel Balchin novel “A Way Through the Wood.”
As always, Fellowes has a pitch-perfect ear for British diction.
“You can have suicidal, bitter, or glad-to-be-rid-of-you,” sneers Wilkinson’s character, clinking ice cubes in a darkened living room. “Only I can’t manage the last, so you’ll have to settle for bitter.”
Wilkinson is a busy corporate lawyer in London, each day leaving beautiful wife Watson behind at the London flat or the country suburban manor. We open with a panning shot of manicured flower beds, country lanes, and an elderly man bicycling along – but the music is a bit off, and suddenly a car careens by, and the old man is knocked from his bike.
The plot backs up to a few days before the accident, then rolls through and beyond. Whose car was it? Why is everyone so jumpy? Even the victims can’t seem perfectly innocent: The family housekeeper whose husband was that stricken bicyclist was fired previously by a different family for theft.
Clearly Fellowes believes in the gap between “innocent” and “not guilty.”
He tosses in other nice maneuvers. A Colombo-style detective says the usual procedural lines, such as, “You see my difficulty.” But the inspector saying it is a stylish black cop who, in another twist, turns out to hail from this country neighborhood and feels kinship to the housekeeper as a working-class stiff.
The pleasure in Fellowes’ writing is that his characters talk to each other, and listen. It’s the kind of screenwriting that keeps you on the edge of your seat to hear more, rather than be the first one out the exit.
*** | “Separate Lies”
R for adult content, language|1 hour, 27 minutes|DRAMA|Written and directed by Julian Fellowes, from a novel by Nigel Balchin; starring Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett and Linda Bassett|Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
