There are films that draw their audience based on the strength of a single actor. Tom Cruise rises and falls on the marquee power of his name - and often not much else. Then there is the odd film that, as you work your way down the credits, promises such an interesting chemistry bubbling up from this mix of talent that you can't help but buy a ticket.

"Married Life," writer/director Ira Sachs' dark crime thriller and equally dark comedy of manners is just such a film.

Set in Seattle in 1949, "Married Life" chronicles the potentially fatal unsettling of the comfortably rutted marriage of Harry (Chris Cooper) and Pat (Patricia Clarkson). Harry has brought some long-absent excitement into his life in the form of a beautiful young girlfriend, Kay (Rachel McAdams), and he wants out of his marriage. But how does he break this to Pat? As he confides to his best friend, Richard (Pierce Brosnan), he's afraid the news will destroy her.

Harry, a sensitive man, hatches a plan: rather than put Pat through the anguish of his infidelity, he will simply kill her outright. This kind of addled thinking has launched many a crime thriller but it's going to take more than a conventional plot device to make this film worth our time.

The help comes in the form of Patricia Clarkson and Chris Cooper's subtle portrayal of a marriage undone by its own durability. Clarkson and Cooper create a complex couple who have sanded down their passionate natures through years of loving accommodation and a post-war yearning for a little social restraint. It is a remarkable, layered performance that gives bite to the film's darker tensions and sparks the unexpected humor hidden in Sachs' clever script.

I asked them in a recent interview how they were able to put together such a compelling portrait of Harry and Pat.

"Patty and I did hang out at the hotel," said Cooper, "talking about the relationship - just touching on it. This is what I often do with other actors. I work out just the skeleton of a timeline - when we met, how we met - and then let the other actor be specific about that summary."

"There was something about Pat that I hadn't played before as a character," Clarkson said. "I saw a woman who was of the time, yet beyond it and confined by the time. Ira, the director and I had spoken that Pat, had she been born a decade later, would have been an editor at Doubleday. There was a fire and spirit in her that I liked and I found her a sexual, sexy character - which I think is refreshing."

For Chris Cooper the role felt like a natural choice.

"To be honest there are some roles where you don't have to beat yourself up in creating the character," said Cooper. "I use the idea that there are some parts that fit like a glove. It was kind of the case with this one. Of course, I did research on the period, the time and what was happening socially and politically and all that business.

"When I did my math it was a time when my granddad was in his fifties. My work was more of a reminiscence of observing my parents' and my grandparents' relationships. There were some good parallels that I could draw from.

"Primarily, looking back on my parents and my grandparents relationships (theirs had) touches of formality. It's a touch more restrictive (and) helped us not to be so casual in our scene work-in our relationship with the other characters."

The chemistry between Clarkson and Cooper benefited from years of friendship.

"She's a special girl and a great, great friend," said Cooper." I hope some of that relationship came onto the work of the characters."

"Chris and I are friends," said Clarkson. "We have mutual friends, I know his wife very well. We have a real relationship that we could build these characters - this relationship on. I felt comfortable with him.

"Chris is a man of few words for the most part and he's quite guarded but he's not cold in anyway or really seriously reserved in anyway. He's formidable but he's quite lively when you get to know him and we had a lot of good laughs on the set. We had to because we had so many intense scenes to shoot."

Like many independent films, "Married Life" draws some of that intensity from the intimacy of its creation - a small cast and a director who is doing double duty as the writer.

"Ira's really amazing and he's a wonderful director. I feel that he and Orin did a beautiful job adapting this. I think he knew it was going to be a smashing of ... genres and this kind of melodrama, thriller, dark comedy," said Clarkson. "He was very careful that everything was played incredibly realistically and for broke. We approached this as a very serious drama. These scenes were intense, even thought they were comical at times and rightly so."

"I think he had a strong idea of films that influenced him," said Cooper. "He did like the larger than life Betty Davis, Joan Crawford films of the 40's and 50's but the selling point was that we wouldn't be playing it that broad. Though it is a period piece and he was influenced by those period films, he wanted to play it a little more modern day and less theatrical."

"The clothes are more formal," said Clarkson. "You're not sitting around in jeans and a tee shirt. That automatically shifts you and changes you but I still feel at the end of the day we're a married couple and it doesn't matter if it's 1949 or 1999. For me acting is about emotion, interaction, intimacy, physicality and that takes place in any time period."

Whatever forces shaped it - talent, temperament, or the alchemic pressure of a small indie budget - "Married Life" came together as a satisfying piece of ensemble acting.

"It was a very insular, intimate set," said Clarkson. "It kind of created a great feeling ... when you arrived because it was just us shooting all day. It was almost like doing theater in a way."

Bruce Bulloch may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com