A Good Marriage (2014)

Running Time: 102 minutes

Release Date: October 3, 2014

Review by: Stacey

Okay, this movie isn't exactly "horror" but over here at To Avoid Fainting, I love any and all forms of dark films, and since this one is based on Stephen King's novella of the same name, I couldn't pass it up.  I'm going to assume that most of you know that there have been many adaptations of King's work- some great (Carrie and The Mist) and some not great at all (Thinner and Desperation).  Where A Good Marriage falls is right on the cusp of the latter.

 

 

 

 Directed by Peter Askin, A Good Marriage follows Darcy (Joan Allen) and Bob (Anthony LaPaglia) Anderson as they celebrate their 25th anniversary happy and in love.  While Bob is away on a business trip, Darcy stumbles across some secrets of his that ruin everything she thought she ever knew about the man she loves.

 

I mean, this movie doesn't play around in the first act.  They give you everything that you need to know and then sit back and wait for you to see where it all goes from there.  Which is not anywhere horribly exciting.  The rest of the film is basically Darcy making every other decision but the right one involving her husband.  It's odd that a wife who has been married to this dude for 25 years can seem to not know shit about him, especially when a lot is glaringly obvious.

That being said, Joan Allen seems to be the only one holding it all together with a half-good story.  LaPaglia plays a manipulative husband well, seemingly switching from loving husband to sociopathic manipulator in the blink of an eye.  Together, the tension is felt...before it's not.  There's also another character that should be someone of importance but he was introduced too late to make a lasting impression.  Next thing you know the movie is over and you're left thinking "that's it?".  Not to mention this one could stand to be a little shorter than 102 minutes; everything could have easily been wrapped up in about 80 minutes.

While I wish they had shown more of the husband's angle, A Good Marriage was really all about a wife's mental turmoil and coming to grips with a life and a husband she thought she knew.  This one definitely falls in the lesser of the Stephen King adaptations and would probably fare better as a Saturday night Lifetime flick.

2/5 more bad decisions from white people

If I haven't turned you off to this film, check out the trailer here: