Stephen King's A Good Marriage

I love Stephen King. Salem's Lot was the first book that really scared me. Desperation was an amazing, dense, twisted ride that my 7th grade self went giddy over. On Writing taught me more about writing than probably any other single book. I very much dig the indie horror VOD boom, which has almost single-handedly kind of made iTunes cool. I also love serial killer stories, and this one was allegedly inspired by the true story of the BTK killer. So I had high hopes for Stephen King's A Good Marriage.

I was a a bit less than enthused that Anthony LaPaglia was starring as the serial killing husband Bob, but he was great, maybe the best thing about the movie. In an early sex scene with his wife, he really nails the detached, joyless coital expressions of a psychopath who engages in spousal intimacy only to keep his cover. In the later scenes, after his wife Darcy (Joan Allen) finds out he's a notorious serial killer, Bob really cuts loose and is very entertaining. You can see how liberated he is to finally share this secret with his wife, who he does actually love, and let someone see who he really is. He's really happily sleazy and seems to finally be a whole person.

But that's a tiny part of the movie, and limited to a few quick scenes of him drunkenly dancing and stumbling around the house. There is an engagingly creepy scene where he stalks a potential victim in a late night coffee shop, but that doesn't lead to anything, and is intercut with Darcy investigating his computer for clues, so it doesn't really develop as a scene unto itself. We don't see Bob freak out into a psychotic blood-rage or anything, which is fine, because this isn't that kind of movie. The complete focus is on the fallout of a wife finding out her husband of many years has been living a total double life. 

I watch movies to see things happen, not to see characters who deal with the consequences of things that happened before the events of the film. I want to see the movie of Bob actually living his double life, not simply the fallout of being discovered. That would be fine at the end of a movie, after it's been at least somewhat established that these characters are worth caring about. But A Good Marriage starts with an ending, stretching and stretching it into a feature length running time.


This is becoming a trend in movies and TV, and I don't think it's good. We're given stories dealing with the fallout of interesting events that happened before the movies starts, or we're shown origin stories of characters who will be interesting later. It seems increasingly rare to be right in the thick of things.

This is very much Joan Allen's movie, which is great. I'm all for the Joan Allen resurgence, and think she deserves an Emmy for her role in Netflix's final season of The Killing. And she is very good here. But we just don't know enough about her Darcy to be all that invested in her journey of discovering her husband's crimes. Even Bob feels slightly drawn, little more than a recurring cameo.

The title comes from a speech their daughter Petra (Kristen Connolly) gives at their 25th anniversary party that starts things off, that they achieved the rarest thing in the world--a good marriage. We're told that they had one, of course, not shown. Is that too much to ask?

Kristen Connolly's involvement was what tipped me into Yes for renting this (along with the similarly enchanting Cara Buono). Kristen Connolly and Cara Buono, the two TV actresses that possibly more than any others in recent years stole everyone's hearts as Christina Gallagher and Dr. Faye Miller, in the same indie horror movie? Sign me up.

Unfortunately, this is where another disappointing movie trend  kicks in--having appealing actors and actresses credited in the film, but who make little more than extended cameos. Connolly and Buono have a combined five minutes of screen time between them--maybe. There's simply no room for them when we have to watch Darcy shuffle around her house in a catatonic daze in scene after scene. I actually missed the ascendent Mike O'Malley's name in the credits and was pleasantly surprised when he made a very brief speech at the opening anniversary party. Of course--we never see him again.

Stephen King's A Good Marriage might make for a perfectly fine short story, but it doesn't feel like much of a movie.