One fine day, while browsing through an issue of Film Comment (as I am wont to do), I had my interest piqued by a film on the back cover titled Five Minutes of Heaven. I was intrigued for two reasons, one being that it was a new film from the director (Oliver Hirschbiegel) of Downfall (2004; starring Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler in one of the most incredible performances I have ever had the pleasure of witnessing). The other reason was that it starred Liam Neeson, whom I had just recently seen in Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008). Due to my admiration of Taken and the exhilarating trailer for Five Minutes of Heaven, I decided to see what else Neeson had been up to lately. That is how I learned of The Other Man. Upon discovering that Laura Linney was also starring in the film, I was sold. The trailer was mighty promising, too.
Unfortunately, Richard Eyre's effort is a tragic case of a good premise gone horribly wrong. The plot is intriguing enough: a seemingly happy couple living in England is introduced; the wife (oddly) asks her husband if he has ever thought of sleeping with another woman; fast-forward to the future where the wife is gone; husband learns that she had been having an affair; husband tracks down his wife's other lover and confronts him, desiring revenge. The husband, Peter (Neeson), is a jealous individual who seems to be easily angered (and who would not be in such a situation?). His wife, Lisa (Linney), is a bit of a mystery. Her conversation early in the film with her husband is incredibly awkward, albeit as a result of poorly written dialogue that serves little purpose other than as an allusion to what revelation is forthcoming - as if the title of the film did not make it obvious enough.
The film revolves around a rather profound twist - at least one that is profound in nature. The actual revelation in the film is forced and rather dull. This was primarily due to the fact that what little interest I had in discovering this ultimate truth was constantly being placed behind my desire to know why the characters were acting the way they were. After the aforementioned conversation between Lisa and Peter, the film, as I said, leaps into the future - though it does not say how far. Peter is giving some of his wife's belongings to his daughter, attempting to clean out the house. Okay, so she is gone. That is all the viewer knows: she is gone. During the exchange with his daughter, Peter is given a note that his wife left for him and from there he begins digging into her apparent secret life, discovering much to his dismay that she had been having an affair with a man named Ralph (Antonio Banderas). Obsessed and angry, he tracks Ralph down in Italy and befriends him. While getting to know Ralph (who constantly talks about Lisa, not knowing that Peter is actually her husband), Peter pretends to be Lisa and starts contacting Ralph through e-mail. For whatever bizarre reason, Peter's daughter decides to make the trip out to Italy to find her father, nearly having an emotional breakdown when she learns that Peter has been posing as Lisa and stringing Ralph along. But why? And why is everyone around Peter so concerned about him, always teary-eyed?
There are a lot of peculiar moments such as these in The Other Man that are given proper explanation by the time the credits role, but the manner in which the climactic events are executed is poorly conceived and wholly unremarkable, especially given the distracting nature of the awkwardness surrounding the actions of practically every character in the film. It is a shame, considering the talented cast (all giving rather good performances) and solid foundation. I went with it at first, hoping that my endurance would pay off, but by the end, I was only left thinking of ways that the film could have been better - incredible, even - and thus utterly distraught that it was not so.
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