Delayed Reaction: The Lovers

Premise: A middle-aged married couple, both carrying on secret affairs, start to reconnect.

I'm mad at this movie. Or maybe I'm just mad at the marketing for the movie. I love the concept. Tracey Letts and Debra Winger are married and carrying on affairs at the same time. For whatever reason, they get a spark back in their relationship. Just the tagline "What if you were having an affair with your spouse?" is canny and clever. There aren't many movies about relationships at that age. Normally, it's about the dissolution of a marriage. This is too, but not really.

However, I was led to believe this was much more of a comedy. A lot of things are called dramedies, which can mean a wide range of tones. I was thinking this was on the "it's a comedy but with a dark edges" end of the spectrum. Instead, it's a drama with some silly moments. There isn't much that's actually funny. The actual tone of the movie is a lot less interesting to me. It's a lot easier to tell the dramatic version of this story. When any scene gets hard to crack, just have someone act devastated. It's a lot harder to find something dryly funny while not undercutting the seriousness of the moment, so I get why the movie doesn't attempt it very often. It makes for a less interesting movie though.

Still, I don't know the last time I say Debra Winger in anything and Tracy Letts rarely takes lead roles in movies. They play off each other well. I appreciate the showmanship of Letts' lies throughout the movie. I also appreciate that neither of them really seems to like their son. There's something about a character not liking their child that I find weirdly humanizing.

The movie does a lot to redeem itself by having the correct ending.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend