Another Man’s Wife is further evidence that one should adjust one’s expectations for a direct-to-Peacock movie. This one’s a what-would-you-do-for-a-couple-million-bucks dramatic thriller that’s tragically short on drama and thrills, and doesn’t bother to indulge the potential sexiness that the title kinda implies. (It also suffered from a terrible Peacock presentation, with regular screen judder and a screwed-up audio mix. It wasn’t just my TV! Promise!) In fact, it’s about as erotic as an assembly manual for a CPR dummy, and not even Taye Diggs in a supporting role can make this one worth your time. Here’s why.
The Gist: We open on a TV interview with Brendan Rhodes (Diggs), a mxyzptlkillionaire tech guy who created a popular dating app and dabbles in video games. He says things that aren’t particularly memorable or interesting – get used to it, because that pretty much sets the tone for everything that follows. Cut to: an ultramodern gigantohome owned by happy couple Maya (Sydney Mitchell) and Shawn (Moritz J. Williams). In the first of countless scenes in which we watch people look at laptop computers, Maya sits in bed looking at her laptop and getting a calendar notification, and Shawn sits on the couch looking at his laptop while working out bugs in the video game he’s programming. They find time for a bit of breakfast nookie (note: we don’t see it beyond the initial sidle-up-and-smooch) then head to work.
Additional staring-at-laptop scenes – another note: I understand the rampant screen addiction in modern life, but a less-accurate reflection of reality sounds great right about now – are interrupted by important things happening. Namely, Maya gets a promotion, which means she’ll spearhead fundraising for the nameless company she works for, which raises money for things and stuff. Details – who needs ’em? Meanwhile, over the course of about two-to-three Intimate Laptop Moments, Shawn gets laid off when the company is bought out, and finds out his mother (Jen Harper) has stage three cancer of the whatever – details schmetails! – and needs incredibly expensive treatment and rehab that she can’t afford. And Shawn doesn’t tell Maya about the job thing for weeks under the guise that he doesn’t want to worry her, but in truth, it’s so the movie can klutzily contrive the first chink in their marital armor.
After we endure a laptop-gazing montage, Maya gets to spearheading a fundraiser for a cause that needs funds. It’s a big gala and everyone’s dressed fancy and who shows up but Brendan Rhodes, looking like a whale walking into a casino. There’s a bit where Maya half-jokingly auctions off a drink with her and Shawn bids $1,000 and Brendan bids $100,000. Oof. Shawn has taken enough hits to his confidence already, but we don’t know the half of it yet. Brendan invites the couple to his room where he sits – SYMBOLISM ALERT – playing chess. “You a checkers kind of guy?” he shoots at Shawn and then gets down to biznasty: He’ll pay two million smackers for a weekend with Maya. That’d cover Mom’s medical bills AND all the stuff that Shawn let slide after he got canned. I dunno, maybe if they moved out of the gigantohome and into a far more modest 4,000 square-footer with only a plebeian single-level pool, they might be able to sidestep the marital nuclear landmines, but if they did that, we wouldn’t have much to watch here. All it takes is an NDA and a signature, and bam, they’re on the way to financial solvency. Piece of cake!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I’m pretty sure the title Indecent Proposal was already taken.
Performance Worth Watching: <This space left blank for administrative purposes>
Sex And Skin: Zilcho.
Our Take: It would be helpful in assuaging our frustration with Another Man’s Wife if its characters acted like human beings instead of Movie Idiots who inevitably make everything worse with their dodgy-as-a-three-dollar-bill decisionmaking. It also might be helpful if the film didn’t grease up 12 minutes of story and Silly Putty it out to 91 minutes. Too many laptop scenes. Too many pregnant pauses. Too many empty moments of dramatic loitering that allow the audience to put two seconds’ thought into the situation and solve all of Maya and Shawn’s problems pragmatically. And the movie becomes a pointlessly tortured lesson in marital communication, a how-not-to-stay-together guide for self-sabotaging imbeciles.
I’m frankly surprised at how inert Another Man’s Wife can be. We get no sense of who the characters are, their intricacies and peccadilloes, their backgrounds and interests. They just look gorgeous, all muscles and perfect makeup, standing around in immaculate surroundings that look more expensive than they probably are. You’d think they’d go doughy right quick from all that laptop action, but no. There’s little dramatic tension, just a plodding meander through a handful of sparse plot points. When Maya goes to Brendan’s for the fateful weekend, what do we see? Shawn going for a jog, getting a drink of water and standing around, looking worried. High drama! And what follows is far more compelling, but far more infuriating, so it’s poisonous either way.
The screenplay layers a half-considered games/chess metaphor on top of the main plot, and it’s the equivalent of tossing a few meager pepperoni slices on top of a sheet of copy paper and calling it a pizza. It’s all shallow, underdeveloped, unconvincing and poorly executed, from dialogue to visual presentation to characterization. It’s flat and lifeless and never even considers being trashy fun. In the very last scene, Shawn pulls out his laptop and goes to open it and then… doesn’t. Progress! All the adversity he’s suffered has clearly made him a whole new man.
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Our Call: Good lord this was boring. SKIP IT.
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John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
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