What did you think of "Unfaithful"?   Good 65% 1211   Bad 22% 399   Wait to rent 13% 244 Total Votes   1854

Grade: B+

Verdict: May not make you feel, but certainly makes you think.

Details: Starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez. Directed by Adrian Lyne. Rated R for sex, language and brief violence. Two hours, 3 minutes.

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Review: Adrian Lyne, the man who turned a 'fridge into a sexual aid in “Nine 1/2 Weeks” and turned Glenn Close into a bunny-boiling psychopath in “Fatal Attraction,” has toned down his act. It becomes him.

“Unfaithful” is a glossy and oddly tasteful morality play about secrets and lies and more secrets and more lies. Lyne has always been a connoisseur of seduction, a virtuoso of adultery. His specialty is beautiful people caught in ugly situations. The beautiful people here — Richard Gere, Diane Lane and French actor Olivier Martinez — are very beautiful indeed, but they're engulfed in an ugliness that contorts and spreads with each passing day.

It is an ill wind that blows no good for the Sumner family. The wind chimes tinkle, the shutters flap and their rambling riverside home in Connecticut seems to shake with impending change. But why? Edward (Gere) and Constance (Lane) have a beautiful home, a cute kid and a cuter dog. There may be flaws underneath the J. Crew surface, but the cracks don't seem critical.

So perhaps it's fate that the same wind literally blows Constance into a sensitive, gorgeous antiquarian book-dealer, Paul Martel (Martinez). She's in Soho to buy favors for her son's party. He's carrying an armload of books to his borrowed loft that looks like something out of Architectural Digest. They collide, strewing balloons and books all over the street. She skins her knee. He invites her up for tea and sympathy. She manages to leave before something besides the tea gets hot.

But the seed is sown. Soon, Constance is finding excuses to be in Soho and, two visits later, she and Paul have sex which we see in steamy, piece-meal flashbacks as Constance heads home on the train — elated, turned on ... and guilty. The affair, which she clearly initiated (though Paul is hardly the type to protest strongly; he has too much stubble and charm), escalates to the point that Edward can't help noticing something is off. The sexy new shoes, the slinky new slip, his wife's slight but unmistakable remoteness.

When he tries to initiate lovemaking in their bath, she shrugs him away, saying, oh-so-symbolically, “I'm cold.”

“Unfaithful” is based on Claude Chabrol's celebrated 1969 French film, “La Femme Infidele.” While the movie is still very much a Hollywood product, Lyne and scriptwriters Alvin Sargent (“Ordinary People”) and William Broyles (“Apollo 13”) have given the picture an European feel — especially the end which may confound some, intrigue others and perhaps infuriate more than a few.

The characters remain removed from us. There's no emotional backstory of spouse abuse or a previous affair or a failed attempt to have another child or anything. There's no one to “root” for as we usually do in adultery movies. Constance is obviously more culpable than the two men, but she's never presented as an out-and-out villain. She's selfish and deceitful, but not the type to boil a bunny.

Or is she? Actions have consequences, the picture tells us, whether anyone ever discovers what's been done or not. Is Constance any less moral because, technically, Edward doesn't know? Is her allegiance to her family any less compromised?

Constance is the film's fulcrum and Lane is smashing in the role. An actress since she was being flung around with the performance art group Cafe La Mama at age six, she's had her share of breaks — “A Little Romance” and “Lonesome Dove.” But she's never really had a breakthrough. Gere and Martinez are both well-cast and it's gracious of Gere to play opposite the kind of character he would've been cast as 20 years ago. Yet we can't take our eyes off Lane. She's solidly persuasive as both a coolly gorgeous rich wife who spends her days volunteering at expensive auction houses full of other coolly gorgeous rich wives or as a heedlessly self-centered cheater who feels a stirring in her blood she can't — won't? — relinquish no matter who gets hurt.

“There's no such thing as a mistake,” says the comfortably amoral Paul. “There is only what you do and what you don't do.” Yet the people in “Unfaithful” make a lot of mistakes, no matter what they do or don't do. Their movie, taken on its own slick, detached, semi-trashy terms, makes a few, too, but not all that many.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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