Separate Lies

"No life is perfect," sighs James Manning (Tom Wilkinson), a successful solicitor whose own imperfect life contains a flat in London and a weekend cottage in bucolic Buckinghamshire. Adding to his tribulations is a beautiful wife, Anne (Emily Watson), who has learned to accept her picky, demanding spouse and welcomes him home in the evenings with a drink and a hot dinner. But beneath Anne's linen frocks and sensible aprons lurks black, lacy underwear - the universal movie symbol for availability (when worn by young, single women) and adultery (when worn by the older, married variety). Anne's bra might as well be sporting a flashing red light.

Separate Lies is a very British, very demure drama that aims for upper-crust passion without actually showing any. This is a pity, because Anne's fancy man is a caddish aristocrat named Bill Bule, played by Rupert Everett, who happens to be the fancy man of choice for a lot of women (and quite a few men). Bill is divorced, with two young sons, whose ages he can barely remember, and Everett, reprising a talent we first noticed in Paul Schrader's 1990 chiller, The Comfort Of Strangers, gives him exactly the right blend of privilege and casual decadence. No one oozes degeneracy like Everett; trouble is, he's the only one oozing at all.

Separate Lies is the debut feature of writer Julian Fellowes - he won an Oscar in 2002 for his Gosford Park screenplay - who has adapted the script from Nigel Balchin's novel, A Way Through The Wood. He describes the film's plot as a "moral maze," which places its sexual shenanigans at the centre of a polite murder mystery. A hit-and-run driver has killed the husband of Anne's cleaning lady, Maggie (Linda Bassett), and the police investigation triggers confessions that turn James's world inside out. Initially sanctimonious, his response to the situation alters drastically when his own emotional self-interest comes into play. Suddenly, doing the right thing is less important then maintaining the status quo and protecting what's his.

All this skullduggery, far from illuminating the central menage-a-trois, only detracts from it. The dirty little secret in Maggie's past, for instance, and its reverberations on the present, is an annoying distraction from the movie's soapy heart - an organ Fellowes never quite locates. You get the feeling he's much more comfortable with the stiff police inspector (David Harewood) and his dogged interrogations than with the messiness of James and Anne's marital breakdown.

Despite its suffocating decorum, the movie contains exceptional performances and some insightful moments. Watson's innocent, Betty Boop eyes and crafty mouth make her one of the most interesting actresses to watch: her face often appears to be at war with itself. And Wilkinson, an actor equally at home in the past (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) or the future (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), takes an unsympathetic character and makes him almost human. More subtle is James's interaction with a quietly adoring secretary (Hermione Norris), whose worshipful glances will seem strangely familiar - at least to those of you who've been watching Harriet Miers and George W. Bush.