UNFAITHFUL
Another moral lecture from Hollywood.
Running time: 124 minutes. Rated R (sex, violence, profanity). At the Empire, West 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue (more theaters on Friday).
‘FATAL Attraction” director Adrian Lyne returns to the theme of adultery with “Unfaithful,” which – despite a wonderful performance by Diane Lane – is not nearly as thrilling, sexy or even believable as its predecessor.
Lane plays Connie Sumner, a middle-aged Westchester matron who has it all: a devoted executive husband (Richard Gere), an 8-year-old son (Erik Per Sullivan of “Malcolm in the Middle”) and a home that rates a spread in Architectural Digest.
She also has plenty of time and money for shopping in SoHo – and that’s what does in poor Connie.
A gale-force wind literally blows her into the arms of Paul Martel (Oliver Martinez), a hunky, 28-year-old French book dealer who invites her up to his loft to bandage her scraped knee.
Soon she is spending every Monday afternoon at Paul’s – that is, when they aren’t engaged in public sex at the Village East multiplex or going at it the restroom of a restaurant where two of Connie’s friends are sitting just feet away.
Though it comes from a director whose résumé includes “Flashdance” and “9 ½ weeks,” these smoke-filled interludes are less erotic than today’s average car commercial.
If “Unfaithful” had been made a generation ago, the film probably would have congratulated Connie for throwing off her stultifying suburban existence for a fling with a younger man.
But this adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1968 “La Femme Infidel” by Alvin Sargent (“Ordinary People”), William Broyles Jr. (“Entrapment”) and a uncredited Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”) is more interested in nonstop moralizing – usually a dubious proposition when it comes from Hollywood filmmakers.
“There is no such thing as a mistake,” Paul lectures Connie, in one wincingly bad speech.
“There’s what you do and what you don’t do.”
Lane, who shows off her well-toned posterior in scene after scene, works at the role so hard you almost believe this smart woman’s attraction to the vapid Paul. You certainly buy her nagging guilt.
The same can’t be said for the stiff performance by Gere -Lane’s co-star in “The Cotton Club” 18 years ago – as the husband becomes suspicious and tracks down Paul at his apartment.
I won’t give away what happens next, but the husband does something violent and completely against his highly controlled character.
Unlike the vastly superior “In the Bedroom,” there’s been no sense at all of this explosion building – and Gere doesn’t have the acting chops to pull it off.
The confrontation seems merely a melodramatic device to pick up the pace of a gloomy, slow-moving drama – and turn “Unfaithful” into an ersatz thriller that, like so many these days, gets progressively more preposterous and obvious.
Leave ’em guessing
THE ending of “Unfaithful” is notably ambiguous for a major studio movie, leaving audiences to debate the future of the couple played by Diane Lane and Richard Gere.
Director Adrian Lyne says he changed the ending after showing preview audiences the more straightforward resolution he had shot at the urging of the movie’s distributor, Twentieth Century Fox.
“I always sort of hankered after [the ambiguous] ending, so eventually, I got my way,” Lyne told the Associated Press.
The 61-year-old British director also altered the final scenes of his most famous movie, “Fatal Attraction,” after preview audiences didn’t respond well to the suicide of the character played by Glenn Close.
That huge hit ends instead with her being killed in self-defense.