In Married Life, Ira Sachs aims a bit lower than Green but obliterates his target: The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad--they're all splendidly of a piece.

It's a sly little fable with at least six very obvious homages to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, and a dark little heart that happily hides under a double-breasted suit.

Married Life congratulates its audience on a sophisticated, humorous complicity in the obvious immorality of Harry's murder plans, as well as in Richard's own ungentlemanly designs on his pal's gorgeous girl. Every adult, the movie suggests, has got a secret.

To a degree, the dynamic between Brosnan and Cooper resembles Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy's relationship from "In The Company Of Men."

A collection of Hitchcock character-types trample over each other to win at love in Married Life, a quirky but entertaining period murder farce.

Is the movie about marriage, or sex, or murder, or the murder plot, or what? I'm not sure. It deals all those cards, and fate shuffles them. You may not like it if you insist on counting the deck after the game and coming up with 52. But if you get 51 and are amused by how the missing card was made to vanish, this may be a movie to your liking.

It's a drama with elements of black comedy and suspense, European in feeling but American in attitude. Just for fun, it's set in 1949, an era of glamour, of Hitchcock and of husbands even more clueless than they are today.

Chris Cooper, the consummate professional, has no trouble making viewers feel sympathy for a potential killer.

It's all quite deftly played with a maturity and introspection that may take you by surprise, though Sachs is perhaps too restrained in parts.

This isn't a film noir, but it hovers in the shadows of that genre of discontent and disillusionment.

An engaging romance noir, a sort of updated "The Postman Always Rings Twice" that packs its surprises into four characters, none of them predictable.

The tone, casting and material form a less-than-perfect match in Married Life, a period domestic drama that never quite decides if it wants to be a credible marital study, a noirish meller or a sly comedy.

Married Life is a tony, well-upholstered vehicle that glides smoothly toward its destination--but despite an unnecessary and overly sentimental coda, that destination isn't necessarily where you thought you were going all along.

This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."