What can I say about “Stephen’s King’s A Good Marriage?” Bad, bad, and more bad. Care to elaborate you say? “A Good Marriage” is exactly as cheesy and generic as you might expect. Sporting paper-thin characterizations and ludicrous plot developments, it tries to keep from going to complete shit by incorporating a good performance by Joan Allen as the loving spouse turned terrified housewife.
I haven’t read the novella on which it’s based, but for Stephen King’s sake I hope this doesn’t do it justice. The plot is simple- middle-aged Darcy (Allen, whose character is either very stupid or very naïve but regardless not remotely likable) finds out that her husband Bob (Anthony LaPaglia, impossible to take seriously) is a sadistic rapist and serial killer.
Here’s where the plot goes seriously awry. Darcy doesn’t want her three grown-up kids to know Daddy’s a deranged murderer, so she comes up with a master plan and makes hubby promise not to do any more killing while she bides her time. Yes, you read that right.
Rather than calling the police, Darcy trusts her homicidal spouse not to kill any women for an expanse of time while she formulates a scheme. This seems more ridiculous the more you think about it, especially when you consider that Bob is out all day doing whatever (going to work, but do you really know for sure?) while Darcy stays at home, trusting on a sexual psychopath not to do any more killing or raping.
What Darcy doesn’t realize is, if Bob kills another young girl, it’s on her. She’s the one who didn’t call the police, although she had myriad opportunities to do so. She’s the one who took the evil bastard’s word for it. All for the sake of the children. Jesus Christ, will someone send us a heroine with a brain!
“A Good Marriage” slogs it’s way to a ludicrous confrontation and a bewilderingly obtuse ending, punctuated by spurts of terrible dialogue. The dialogue is awful, cheesy, dumbed-down gobbledegook, but even that isn’t bad enough to be truly funny, just painful.
Despite it’s pedigree of being based on a novella by ‘Master of Horror’ Stephen King, this disaster of a TV movie is a cut-and-paste, unspectacular, artless piece of rubbish. I would not recommend it to anyone.
Mrs. Joan Allen gives a halfway decent performance that is wasted on a terrible script, but nothing about the characters or plot development rang true, and this movie doesn’t deserve to be in the same sentence along with King adaptations such as Kubrick’s “The Shining” or “Stand by Me.”
The Cinematic Emporium 