Susan Granger’s review of “The Other Man” (Image Entertainment)
When glamorous Lisa (Laura Linney) asks Peter (Liam Neeson), her stolid, tweedy husband of 25 years, “Do you think people can live together all their lives?” followed by “Do you ever wish you could sleep with someone else?” – the unmistakable signposts of suspicion and duplicity are difficult to miss.
When Lisa disappears soon after, Peter becomes obsessed with unraveling the hidden secrets of his wife’s life. A celebrated haute-couture shoe designer in London, Lisa’s always been independent, traveling around the world with her fashion coterie. Then Peter discovers a mysterious message on her cell phone and a ‘locked’ icon on her laptop labeled ‘Love.’ Eventually, he comes up with a password – “Lake Como” – that opens a file of photos showing Lisa frolicking wantonly with another man in that Italian resort. Since he’s the CEO of a Cambridge software company, it’s not difficult for Peter to discover Lisa had an affair with a Spaniard in Milan named Ralph (Antonio Banderas). Boarding the next plane to Italy, Peter proceeds to stalk his wife’s lover, playing a cat-and-mouse game to enable him to meet Ralph in a café, play chess with him and coax out the details of the affair without revealing who he is. In the meantime, there’s a subplot involving Lisa and Peter’s testy twentysomething daughter Abigail (Romola Garai) and her stonemason fiancé.
Adapted from a story by German author Bernhard Schlink (“The Reader”) by Charles Wood and director Richard Eyre (“Notes on a Scandal”), this psychological thriller doesn’t make sense: why would Ralph confide in a superficial acquaintance like Peter? Then, when it’s suddenly revealed that Ralph is not who he seems and that Peter is also coming from a different place than we suspected, the concept is beyond bizarre.
Both Liam Neeson and Antonio Banderas seem miscast, caricatures rather than characters. Only Laura Linney conveys a sense of reality yet, in retrospect, she’s more talked about than on-screen. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Other Man” is a skewed 6, revolving around the many forms of betrayal.
