On a brisk night in Denver, actor Chris Cooper and director Ira Sachs raised their glasses. The writers strike had ended earlier in the day. You can trust their toast was heartfelt.
Since Cooper first began making movies with writer-director John Sayles, he has dug deep into richly drawn characters: from a union organizer in Sayles’ “Matewan” to the lethally repressed neighbor in “American Beauty” to traitor Robert Hanssen in last year’s “Breach.”
In 2002, he won an Oscar for his portrayal of orchid lover John Laroche in “Adaptation,” Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s comedic take on Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief.”
For two decades, the Kansas City-born actor, who lives with wife Marianne Leone Cooper in Massachusetts, has entrusted his deep intuitions to eclectic directors. Sachs is the latest.
The 2000 Montepulciano the duo hoisted that night, however, wasn’t remotely the sort of beverage Cooper’s character would drink in Sachs’ wry romantic drama, “Married Life,” set in 1949.
No, Harry Allen would have a martini at the end of the day. And it’s likely wife Pat would mix it.
In “Married Life,” opening Friday in Denver, the incomparable Patricia Clarkson plays Harry’s wife. Pierce Brosnan is his best, if caddish, friend, Richard.
Suave, observant Richard also narrates this tale of Harry, a man so smitten with his new love (Ra- chel McAdams as Kay) that he decides to let his wife of many years go (one must add) gentle into that good night.
Yes, honorable stalwart Harry decides that in order to marry Kay, he must kill Pat. It’s a mercy killing. Leaving her would be too painful — for her. It sounds absurd, or, at the very least, like another chilly cinematic excursion into the amoral. Yet Sachs and his cast deliver a briskly entertaining work, redolent with brewing and stewing emotions.
The day the film was set to premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Sachs sat in a hotel restaurant talking about his exceptional quartet of performers when he shared a story from the shoot that illustrates Cooper’s gifts.
In a scene that didn’t make it into the final version, Harry says, “I was a funny kid. Do you remember? I was a funny kid.”
There on the set, Sachs said, he stopped Cooper. “Chris, that kid isn’t 8,” he told him. “He’s 12.” Cooper said something effusive like, “Right.”
“He performs it again and the kid he’s talking about — no more text, just subtext — is now 12.” Sachs laughed with a kind of awe at the memory.
“Chris is really like an idiot savant as an actor. Truly. Not to say he’s an idiot but he’s definitely a savant,” he said.
“What an actor needs from a director is a shorthand,” said the savant over his steak in Denver when this was recounted to him. “Give me key words; usually that’s all we need. That’s not to make light of it. It’s an actor’s training to get what the director wants, but the director must be very specific.”
Some actors need that long talk, he said. “I want to come prepared with my ideas, but be open enough that if I’m on the wrong track, I can take direction and get in another head if what I’m doing isn’t working.”
The director and the actor’s shared homework began while Cooper was shooting Peter Berg’s Middle East political thriller, “The Kingdom.”
Sachs traveled to Mesa, Ariz., and the two went over the script line by line.
“It’s a luxury,” Cooper said. “It rarely happens. But I wanted to make sure we were on the same wavelength as far as understanding where Harry Allen was coming from.”
The movie is an intriguing departure for the actor as well as the writer-director of “The Delta” and “Forty Shades of Blue,” which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. That drama, starring Rip Torn as a music producer, was set in Memphis, where Sachs grew up.
“Having had a couple of films that were psychological, domestic-focused, I was interested in exploring the same themes but in a different form,” said Sachs.
He spent a summer reading pulp fiction when he came across John Bingham’s “Five Roundabouts to Heaven.” He and co-writer Oren Moverman turned it into “Married Life.”
“This novel had the kind of very true elements of what it’s like to be in a house, to be married, to be with a person for a long time,” Sachs said. “But it was also told in a way that reminded me of a number of 1940s and 1950s Joan Crawford, Bette Davis movies.”
This tension between the film’s genre gestures (noir, romantic drama) and its humanist conclusions is what makes Sachs’ movie such a pleasure. That and the engaging — daring, even — performances of Cooper and his co-stars.
So an obvious question for the actor came up: What drives him?
“I run on fear,” he replied, no hesitation. “I run on fear. Because I want to go so beyond myself and I don’t know if I can do it.”
He can. He has. He does.
Troubled and troubling Harry Allen is just the latest proof.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@ . Also on blogs .denverpostcom/madmoviegoer.
