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Movie review: “I Think Love My Wife”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
In 1970, Hollywood turned from pictures of ’60s style free love to a picture about ’70s style captive love. That year it was “I Love My Wife,” about a man chafing at monogamous marriage. This year, it’s “I Think I Love My Wife,” about a monogamous man chafing at marriage; specifically, a seven-year marriage to a woman who’s lately been in a perpetual state of “not tonight, dear.”
Richard (Chris Rock) and Brenda (Gina Torres) have two cute kids. Brenda is beautiful, a great mom; and she makes the house run like a well-oiled machine with mechanically compliant assistance from her sweetly nagged husband. She’s trying marriage counseling, but there hasn’t been a break through. So, Richard is “bored out of his mind.”
He’s undressing every (well, the under-40 set) woman he sees at the commuter train platform; he’s fantasizing about how women would be hanging off him if he were single; he’s got his stash of Asian girl x-rated clips on his computer and he’s turning to an associate (Steve Buscemi) at work, who’s a chronic cheater (and, happily married, he claims), for advice.
So, Richard is ready for the vision in the skin-tight red dress that walks into his investment bank corner office one day: his old high school flame, Nikki (Kerry Washington). She’s there to ask for an innocent letter of reference from an old friend…nothing to get worked up about, right? Except, Nikki can smell a rocky marriage at thirty paces, and it’s not long before she’s acting like Richard is fair game.
The rest of the story is fairly standard bait and switch teases, with Richard inching closer and closer to crossing the fidelity line while scrambling to get himself out of figurative and literal tight spots with Nikki. When Brenda’s husband-theft alarm goes off; when big sales meetings get missed and when Nikki’s ex-boyfriend uses Richard’s face for a punching bag, Richard tries to break the non-affair off.
But, Nikki’s got a few more tricks up her sleeveless, low-cut dress. There’s nothing wrong with trotting out the hot-to-trot married man theme, if you can think about doing something different with it. But this adaptation of the French comedy, Chloe in the Afternoon, by Rock (who also directs) and Louis C.K. is an insulting re-tread that makes every woman in Rock’s version the enemy and the leading man a hero if he fights off their manipulative attentions or endures the lack thereof.
Everyone involved in the production deserves better. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release (on March 16), rated R for strong sexual content and language.
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