In “Married Life” the thrills are muted

A sometimes amusing but more often wooden film about postwar adultery, Married Life succeeds only in reminding you that Eliot Spitzer isn’t all bad. After all, he never tried to murder his wife.

In a distinctly Hitchcockian 1949, Harry (Chris Cooper) is married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson), but he’s sleeping with a young, impeccably pretty widow named Kay (Rachel McAdams). Since Pat talks frankly about sex and Kay is a ruby-lipped bottle blonde, our sympathies naturally align with the wife. But Kay is mostly just lonely and Pat is behaving badly too, which evens out the field and makes what comes next feel oddly abstract. Harry decides it would be mean to leave Pat, so he takes the high road—he’ll poison her with photographic chemicals instead.

The drama mounts as Harry plots the deed, but the will-he-succeed-or-will-he-repent tension is pure formula, and without characters that can make us care, the thrills are muted.

MARRIED LIFE DIR. IRA SACHS | RATED PG-13 | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA AND OC