Script: Unfaithful

I’d seen previews for Unfaithful, so I kind of knew what was going to happen (when will trailers learn we’ll respect them more if they stop just giving it away?) but I found myself so caught up that I forgot I knew what was coming.

And I learned three great things. Less talk is more, perspective can be forced, and shades of grey are better.

Less talk is more. First off, no one in this film ever talks about what’s happening. They never admit, “I’m having an affair,” even to themselves, or “by the way, I’m married.” All the characters, despite steamy sex scenes, are so repressed they never talk about anything. And this is powerful, because it’s this big gorilla, just sitting in the room, and we become increasingly anxious for someone, anyone, to just SAY it.

The most powerful moment in this film is not when a wife decides to cheat on her husband, or when the husband is driven by jealousy to commit murder, but when the husband and wife finally talk about the fact that she’s slept with someone else. Up until this point, all the information the husband has gotten about his wife has been from other people – from her lover, in fact.

So when one of them finally tells the other what’s actually, honestly happening and how they feel about it – it’s huge. And for me, that’s smarter than just sex and murder.

Perspective can be forced. The first half of the film is told from the wife’s perspective. But when her husband meets the lover and kills him, we suddenly spend a lot of time in his point of view. I wasn’t sure how they got away with this, but then I realized they’d done exactly what my buddy over at Brollywood did once.

He was given the task of writing a short western – with no guns. He came up with a great solution. He built a story around the conspicuous absence of guns. It was about people who were desperate but unable to get their hands on a gun. It worked really well, and made a weakness into a strength.

And that’s what they’ve done in Unfaithful. The scene is built around a wife-shaped hole, as the two men in her life talk about her. So when the husband kills the lover, we feel her presence through what she has indirectly made him do, and thoughts of her drive him as he cleans up after his crime.

Shades of grey are better. Nobody was a bad person in this story. We don’t hate the wife for cheating, but we don’t dislike her husband enough that we want her to cheat on him, either. And when the husband commits murder, we actually feel pretty bad for him.

The same thing can mostly be said for the lover. He’s charismatic, but not in a sleazy way, so we don’t really hate him for seducing another man’s wife. Although, he does conveniently reveal himself to be a dick right before the husband kills him.

No one here is a stereotype. The film hasn’t made it easy to judge these people. There’s no black and white, only intriguing shades of grey, that leave the audience questioning whether anyone really did anything wrong – and questioning themselves, morally, for wondering about that.