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The heart has its reasons, said the French philosopher Pascal, quoted by the American philosopher Woody Allen . It is a useful insight when no other reasons seem apparent. Connie Sumner's heart and other organs have their reasons for straying outside a happy marriage in "Unfaithful,'' but the movie doesn't say what they are. This is not necessarily a bad thing, sparing us tortured Freudian explanations and labored plot points. It is almost always more interesting to observe behavior than to listen to reasons.

Connie ( Diane Lane ) and her husband, Edward ( Richard Gere ), live with their 9-year-old son, Charlie ( Erik Per Sullivan ), in one of those Westchester County houses that has a room for every mood. They are happy together, or at least the movie supplies us with no reasons why they are unhappy. One windy day she drives into New York City, is literally blown down on top of a rare book dealer named Paul Martel ( Olivier Martinez ), and is invited upstairs for Band-Aids and a cup of tea. He occupies a large flat filled with shelves of books and art objects.

Martel is your average Calvin Klein model as a bibliophile. He has the Spanish looks, the French accent, the permanent three-day beard, and the strength to suspend a woman indefinitely in any position while making love. He is also cool in his seduction methods. Instead of making a crude pass, he asks her to accept a book as a gift from him, and directs her down an aisle to the last book on the end of the second shelf from the top, where he tells her what page to turn to, and then joins her in reciting the words there: Be happy for this moment, for this moment is your life.

Does it occur to Connie that Martel planted that book for just such an occasion as this? No, because she likes to be treated in such a way, and soon she's on the phone with a transparent ruse to get up to his apartment again, where Martel overcomes her temporary stall in bed by commanding her: Hit me! That breaks the logjam, and soon they're involved in a passionate affair that involves arduous sex in his apartment and quick sex in restrooms, movie theaters and corridors. (The movie they go to see is Tati's "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday'' which, despite its stature on my list of The Great Movies, fails to compete with furtive experiments that would no doubt have Hulot puffing furiously at his pipe.) Edward senses that something is wrong. There are clues, but mostly he picks up on her mood, and eventually hires a man to shadow her.

Discovering where Martel lives, he visits there one day, and what happens then I will not reveal. What does not happen then, I am happy to reveal, is that the movie doesn't turn into a standard thriller in which death stalks Westchester County and the wife and husband fear murder by each other, or by Martel.

That's what's intriguing about the film: Instead of pumping up the plot with recycled manufactured thrills, it's content to contemplate two reasonably sane adults who get themselves into an almost insoluble dilemma.

"Unfaithful" contains, as all movies involving suburban families are required to contain, a scene where the parents sit proudly in the audience while their child performs bravely in a school play. But there are no detectives lurking in the shadows to arrest them, and no killers skulking in the parking lot with knives or tire-irons. No, the meaning of the scene is simply, movingly, that these two people in desperate trouble are nevertheless able to smile at their son on the stage.

The movie was directed by Adrian Lyne , best known for higher-voltage films like " Fatal Attraction " and "Indecent Proposal.'' This film is based on "La Femme Infidele" (1969) by Claude Chabrol , which itself is an update of Madame Bovary. Lyne's film is juicier and more passionate than Chabrol's, but both share the fairly daring idea of showing a plot that is entirely about illicit passion and its consequences in a happy marriage. Although cops turn up from time to time in "Unfaithful," this is not a crime story, but a marital tragedy. Richard Gere and Diane Lane are well-suited to the roles, exuding a kind of serene materialism that seems happily settled in suburbia. It is all the more shocking when Lane revisits Martel's apartment because there is no suggestion that she is unhappy with Gere, starved for sex, or especially impulsive. She goes back up there because--well, because she wants to. He's quite a guy. On one visit he shows her The Joy of Cooking in Braille. And then his fingers brush hers as if he's reading The Joy of Sex on her skin.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Unfaithful (2002)

Rated R For Sexuality, Partial Nudity, Language and A Scene Of Violence

123 minutes

Diane Lane as Connie Sumner

Richard Gere as Edward Sumner

Olivier Martinez as Paul Martel

Erik Per Sullivan as Charlie Sumner

Directed by

• Adrian Lyne
• Alvin Sargent
• William Broyles Jr

Based on the film by

• Claude Chabrol

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Unfaithful (United States, 2002)

Adrian Lyne must have a fascination for examining the ins and outs of marital infidelity. Unfaithful , Lyne's first outing since the controversial Lolita , follows in the distant wake of Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal . In some ways, Unfaithful (based on Calude Chabrol's superior La Femme Infidele , which was a re-telling of "Madame Bovary") is the least complicated of the three, but the moral is the same: extra-marital sex, regardless of the underlying reasons, is a bad idea. As one character in this movie suggests, it may all start as fun and games, but, once it moves past a one-night stand, it will inevitably end badly for one or both parties.

The first two-thirds of Unfaithful are an interesting, if at times overwrought, look at how a seemingly happily-married woman can fall into an affair, and how she copes with leading a double life. She loves her son and husband, but craves the other man. For a while, the clandestine nature of this relationship is blissful, but there comes a time when complications begin to surface - she becomes careless, forgets to pick up her son after school, and tells lies that are easily disproved. Her husband becomes suspicious. That's when Unfaithful takes an unfortunate turn down a blind alley that leads to lurid melodrama.

The movie begins in Westchester County, New York (a suburb of the city), where Edward and Connie Sumner (Richard Gere and Diane Lane) are living a storybook existence. They have a comfortable marriage, a nine-year old son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), and enough money to assure that their material needs are met. Then comes one windy day in Manhattan's Soho, when Connie loses her balance and is rescued by gallant Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), an impossibly good-looking book dealer whose smoldering glance catches Connie's attention. She returns the next day, ostensibly to thank him, then the day after that, with no excuse except that she finds him fascinating. Soon, they are engaged in what can only be described as sexual acrobatics (I defy anyone to attempt half the positions these two try). And, when Edward catches Connie in a seemingly innocent lie, he begins to wonder - which leads him to hire a private investigator.

No part of Unfaithful is likely to be mistaken for great art, but, as a non-demanding look at the pros and cons of adultery, this film does a decent job. One of the intriguing aspects is that Lyne doesn't fall back on the number one reason for on-screen faithlessness: the bad marriage. Edward and Connie are happy together, and clearly love one another. Connie's dalliance has more to do with the urge to explode outside of the confines of a carefully ordered life than because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with her husband. Indeed, it doesn't take long before the initial exuberance of the affair erodes into something far less heady. Connie is not in love with Paul; she's in lust with him. Their early encounters may possess a semi-romantic aura, but that has dissipated by the time they stumble into a public lavatory and go at it in a stall.

As is almost obligatory for a Lyne film, there's plenty of hot sex. Unfaithful is actually pretty tame when it comes to nudity (there are a few shots of Diane Lane's breasts and one of her buns), but there's quite a bit of simulated sexual activity, some of which requires the stamina and strength of a professional athlete. Unfaithful is surprisingly well acted, with Lane easily commanding the camera's attention. Over the years, she has developed into a capable actress with impressive range. With the possible exception of A Walk on the Moon (the other movie in which she played a cheating housewife), Lane has never been better. She is particularly effective in the scene when she finally succumbs to Paul's seduction; the combination of arousal and nervousness is powerful. Richard Gere, relegated to the role of the cuckolded husband with an expanding waistline, has found a part that agrees with him. His performance is less stiff and unyielding than is typical. French actor Olivier Martinez is borderline awful, but he's in the movie more for his looks than for his thespian capabilities.

I would almost be willing to recommend Unfaithful as a guilty pleasure if not for the final forty minutes. I hate it when screenplays take the easy way out, and that's what happens here. After the plot's big turning point, the movie loses its focus and can't decide whether it wants to be a melodrama or a crime thriller. The ending is ambiguous in all the wrong ways, and comes across as a cheat more than anything else. (I had a feeling, based on the way the closing scene was edited, that something was coming that didn't happen - it may have ended up on the cutting room floor.) The good points about Unfaithful can't overcome the movie's eventual downward spiral.

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Unfaithful Review

07 Jun 2002

123 minutes

Adrian Lyne used to direct rip-offs — bludgeoning Play Misty For Me or Carnival Of Souls into Fatal Attraction or Jacob’s Ladder — but has apparently graduated to remakes. Having gone after Kubrick with Lolita , here he Americanises Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidele (Chabrol doesn’t get a credit until the end titles), a superbly-nuanced study in French bourgeois cruelty with a Hitchcockian suspense finale.

Though Unfaithful is scrupulously faithful to the original script, hinging its pivotal scene on the same throwaway line of dialogue, the original just doesn’t translate. This is yet another starchy, draggy Richard Gere remake of a ‘serious’ French film (see Intersection, Sommersby ). Lane does fine work in a blank role, but her male leads are quietly ridiculous and Lyne’s trademarked shagging sequences (in a café toilet etc.) seem sadly tame.

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Not for kids, but some adults will like it.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

One graphic violent confrontation.

Intense and graphic sex scenes; adultery.

Strong language.

Drinking and smoking.

Parents need to know that this movie contains a number of elements that may be upsetting to children. The theme of infidelity runs through the movie, and it creates some tense scenes of home life. Connie's seduction is quite overwhelming, and the sex scenes are intense and graphic. There is also one pretty violent…

Violence & Scariness

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

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Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie contains a number of elements that may be upsetting to children. The theme of infidelity runs through the movie, and it creates some tense scenes of home life. Connie's seduction is quite overwhelming, and the sex scenes are intense and graphic. There is also one pretty violent scene. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (1)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Excellent. But NOT for kids.

Glorified porn movie is all this one is, what's the story.

Based on Claude Chabrol's La Femme Infidel , this story of obsession, betrayal, and jealousy centers on happily married Edward ( Richard Gere ) and Connie ( Diane Lane , who seem to have everything until the wife is drawn into an affair. After a chance encounter with Paul (Oliver Martinez), Connie finds she can't stay away from the seductive Frenchman. At home, Edward knows something is wrong. As his wife primps in private and shies away from his advances, his suspicions mount. Finally, after Connie is spotted in a restaurant with Paul, he cannot avoid the truth. A private detective produces all the details, and Edward goes, broken-hearted, to the apartment of his rival.

Is It Any Good?

Adults may consider Unfaithful a worthwhile portrayal of emotional suspense, told with director Adrian Lyne's characteristic visual flair. But it's not for kids -- it's a shocker. None of the plot elements are novel, but the seduction is handled very smoothly, without a lot of the emotional short-hand that would leave the story hollow. In fact, the strength of this film is its very down to earth emotional perceptiveness.

The movie makes us constantly aware of the currents of affection that run between the characters, yet the best scene in the film is the confrontation. Neither knows exactly what to do, and it's in this strange emotional limbo that a tragic choice is made.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the title. The film is symmetrical -- the wife is unfaithful in the first half, the husband in the second. To whom is the husband unfaithful? What "happens" in their final conversation? What is forgivable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 10, 2002
• On DVD or streaming : May 20, 2003
• Cast : Diane Lane , Olivier Martinez , Richard Gere
• Director : Adrian Lyne
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 124 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexuality, language, and violence
• Last updated : July 25, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Unfaithful Reviews

A dark, delusional piece of sultry fantasia that doesn’t condemn or condone Connie or Ed’s choices. It simply presents people surprised by the ease with which they transgress and allow little white lies to fester into gigantic, tumorous deceptions.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 8, 2023

Diane Lane anchors the movie: she plays real and she looks real, with just enough lines and hints of wrinkles; a beautiful woman who's been distracted by too many school runs and charity committees.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2018

A film at once romantic and sensual and agonizing.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2017

...an erratically-paced and distinctly overlong drama that nevertheless manages to pack a punch here and there...

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 24, 2017

This is a great movie, and so many of the things being written about it are just plain FACTUALLY wrong.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2016

Not for kids, but some adults will like it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 29, 2010

Works precisely because it is so upsetting, unusually so for a studio film, and so empathetic for Connie at the hands of her attractive manipulator. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 1, 2009

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Unfaithful is not so much about the conventions of a typical bored housewife falls for exotic foreigner with disastrous results story, but in fact plumbs the depths of what really constitutes intimacy, and how complacency, rather than the melodramatic ups

Full Review | Jul 2, 2008

[Diane Lane] is more than enough reason to see "Unfaithful."

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Much subtler than Lyne's previous forays into the world of infidelity, and the film is the better for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 6, 2006

The outstanding performances help smooth over the plot devices.

Full Review | May 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Aug 7, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 66/100 | Mar 16, 2004

Gere is convincing in a role that he most likely would have not taken even five years ago.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 20, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 20, 2003

Devolves...from bland diversion into some truly unsettling sexual politics, and tumbles from that already low plateau into an ersatz In the Bedroom.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Mar 19, 2003

Film reviews and more since 2009

Unfaithful  (2002) review, dir. adrian lyne, by: steve pulaski, rating: ★★★.

Connie (Diane Lane) and her husband Edward (Richard Gere) live a content life in the middle-class suburbs of New York; not happy, but content. With their nine-year-old son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), days are at least sprinkled with a little bit of excitement. In the opening scenes of Adrian Lyne’s  Unfaithful , we’re supplied with enough context to believe that both Connie and Edward have a marriage that may not bear the gushy romance it quite possibly once did, but at least has the loyalty and bond of one that’s firmly in-tact. One windy day, Connie ventures down to New York City where she is nearly blown away. Escaping a nasty fall with only a knee-scrape, she catches the attention of a rare book dealer named Paul (Olivier Martinez), a handsome soul who invites her upstairs for a cup of tea. Once in his apartment, Connie is surrounded by literature and the possibility of a brewing affair.

Paul seduces Connie in a crafty way. The kind of manner where things just naturally occur, and impulse precludes any rational, in-the-moment thought that this might not be a good idea. He reads her some Spanish poetry, gifts her a book, and tells her he’d love to see her again. Against all her better judgments, she obliges, and it eventually turns into romance. The two become like horny schoolkids, having sex in public bathrooms while her friends are just a few paces outside, and Connie crafts several excuses to go into the city and see her new lover, as if Paul’s initial line of quoted poetry has been taken a bit too literally by her: “be happy for this moment,” he reads upon their initial meeting, “for this moment is your life.”

Over time, Edward begins to suspect something is up. He’s suspicious enough to hire a private investigator, who eventually delivers him the soul-crushing news. It’s this fork in the road instance where  Unfaithful  could become a ridiculous and overwrought romantic thriller with no subtlety and little in the way of plausibility. But Lyne, working off of a screenplay by Alvin Sargent ( Ordinary People ) and William Broyles Jr., along with the novel  The Unfaithful Wife  by Claude Chabrol, opts for a slowburn, intimate approach that shows how two well-to-do, level-headed individuals can fall down a well of bad choices and undesirable outcomes that paradoxically push them away from one another while practically stitching them together as cohorts.

For the most part,  Unfaithful  dials down the sensationalism of the story. It could’ve turned into a seriously bonkers thriller, but Lyne is more fascinated by showing how Connie and Edward succumb to this swirling cloud of deceit and infidelity. Sargent and Broyles Jr. offer no easy heroes nor easy villains. One can dislike Connie’s choices, but it’s harder to paint her as an objectively bad person. She’s a bored woman with desires she doesn’t know she has, largely because her marriage has become one that is defined by the necessities of life, regardless of how banal they seem: go to work, send the kid off to school, make dinner, and maybe read while you bathe. Something often has to give.

Unfaithful  is a film defined by the tired and worn facial expressions of its characters. Gere and Lane are captivating almost solely on the basis of what they don’t say. Lyne, who directed the grimly haunting  Jacob’s Ladder  as well as the more comparable  Fatal Attraction , lets his camera linger on their expressions we can interpret as exhaustion, nervousness, bliss, relief, or pensiveness, and the hallmarks of his pictures are on full display here. Lyne typically goes for dark, moody aesthetics that allow the kind of impressionism that is facial expressions to feel enhancing to the story as opposed to empty. It’s also when he goes to profile the more intense emotions of the characters that he mines his talented actors for passion and tension in a way that lacks the cartoon explosiveness  Unfaithful  could’ve had. While it might’ve been interesting if Sargent and Broyles Jr. allowed their characters to take a more confrontational approach at one another, that could’ve led to the theatrics the film, outside of its inky-black visuals, lacks. It leaves me torn, but from what I’ve seen from Lyne, I feel he made not only the right choice, but also the appropriate one.

Unfaithful  could’ve been Lyne going not where the puck was or wasn’t as a director, but where it had once been. Upon its release in 2002 (to date, Lyne’s last directorial effort),  Fatal Attraction  was 15-years-old, and  Unfaithful , had it not been for the film’s many strengths, would’ve likely been seen as an inferior clone of what Lyne had not only done but mastered many years ago. There is a different kind of meat to this story, however; one that shows how arbitrary infidelity can be and how even if you minimize some of the suspenseful elements of a story, you have an entirely different one that works on its own merits.

OTHER REVIEWS OF ADRIAN LYNE FILMS: My review of Deep Water My review of Fatal Attraction My review of Flashdance My review of Foxes My review of Indecent Proposal My review of Jacob’s Ladder My review of Lolita (1997) My review of Nine ½ Weeks

Starring: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, and Erik Per Sullivan. Directed by: Adrian Lyne.

About Steve Pulaski

Steve Pulaski has been reviewing movies since 2009 for a barrage of different outlets. He graduated North Central College in 2018 and currently works as an on-air radio personality. He also hosts a weekly movie podcast called "Sleepless with Steve," dedicated to film and the film industry, on his YouTube channel. In addition to writing, he's a die-hard Chicago Bears fan and has two cats, appropriately named Siskel and Ebert!

© 2024 Steve Pulaski | Contact | Terms of Use

Designed by Andrew Bohall

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Diane Lane has long been in search of the right role to blend her actor’s grit and star radiance. Since her vibrant film debut at twelve, in 1979’s A Little Romance , Lane has mostly been puffing up peacocks, be it Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm or Keanu Reeves in Hardball . Indie flicks such as My New Gun and A Walk on the Moon revealed her range, but the show-stopping role to touch a nerve with audiences has eluded her.

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Until now. As Connie Sumner, the wife and mother who shatters her seemingly idyllic life with husband Edward (Richard Gere) in the swank burbs of New York’s Westchester County by fucking her brains out with Paul (Olivier Martinez), a hunky SoHo bookseller, Lane is a force of nature. Her slow-burning, fiercely erotic performance charges the movie, which is a sordid, silky wallow in guilty sex — and I mean that as a compliment. For director Adrian Lyne, working from a script by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr., Unfaithful (woman cheats on husband) is the flip side to his megahit Fatal Attraction (husband cheats on wife). And the damn ruse still works.

If Unfaithful seems less shallow than Lyne’s Indecent Proposal , it’s because the story is loosely based on Claude Chabrol’s memorably wicked La Femme Infidele , in which a husband’s revenge on his wife’s lover revitalizes his marriage. The new ending, though purposefully ambiguous, trades in Chabrol’s subversive wink for a bogus stand on family sanctity. But that’s just the end. Before that, Lane and Martinez turn on enough carnality to singe the screen. And Gere, though still more stud than shlub, locates the emotional reserves in Edward that might chill a marriage. When Edward finally unleashes his pent-up rage, Gere is shockingly good. Unfaithful isn’t anything new — Lyne’s fear of female sexuality is as disquieting as ever — but this seductive tease of a thriller gets the job done. It’s a scorcher.

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2002 rewatch: Unfaithful brought sex to the summer movie season, before the superheroes took over

Diane Lane gives a stunning performance in the (last?) great erotic thriller.

Every week, Entertainment Weekly is looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002. As audiences struggled to understand the new post-9/11 world order, Hollywood found itself in a moment of transition, with upcoming stars and soon-to-be-forever franchises playing alongside startling new visions and fading remnants of the old normal. Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood's strange new millennium. This week: Critics Leah Greenblatt and Darren Franich take the commuter train to Unfaithful. Last week: Spider-Man launches the age of the superhero megahit . Next week: The clones attack.

LEAH: Darren, it feels only fair that we honor the seven-and-a-half week anniversary of our favorite spicy snail opus , Deep Water , by looking back at another Adrian Lyne project, Unfaithful . Can you believe it's been 20 years since Diane Lane forsook her safe suburban housewifery for bathroom coitus in lower-Manhattan bistros with a dreamy French bookseller?

There's no one quite like Lyne when it comes to hot sex followed immediately by harsh moral judgment (see: Fatal Attraction , Indecent Proposal , 9 ½ Weeks ); I mean, this is the guy who chose to retell Lolita in the year of our Lord 1997. Unfaithful is freely adapted from a 1969 French film, La Femme Infid è le , though the basics of the plot are pretty much the same: Edward ( Richard Gere ) and Connie (Lane) have their bucolic Westchester life with a son and a dog; he does something mogul-ish with a trucking company, while she mostly stays busy doing rich-mom things.

Clearly not busy enough: A chance encounter in Manhattan with Paul ( Olivier Martinez ), a Parisian expat with impossible bone structure and a seemingly unlimited capacity for afternoon delight, leads to a passionate affair. And spoiler, Edward quickly starts to suspect something is amiss. It's all steeped in peak early 2000s erotic-thriller style — Lane earned a well-deserved Oscar nod for the role — though I have to admit I'm one of those psychopaths who enjoys the first golden hour of things much more than the half with the consequences (hence why I always drop off a little bit after Jude Law's Dickie dies in The Talented Mr. Ripley ). Are you a better human than me, hopefully?

DARREN: Only Nixon could go to China, and only Adrian Lyne could make Unfaithful . At his apex as a purveyor of flesh-peddling grandiosity, he delivered a carnal frenzy about marital ennui, with a focus on female complexity and an emotional delicacy most erotic thrillers never attempted. Like you, I love the first hour, which enraptures Connie in a have-it-both-ways fantasia. A biblical wind pushes her towards the dreamy Frenchman, who lives in a sexy SoHo library. That's just a short train ride away from her awesome house, where her genial hubby and goofy son wait patiently. (They have a personal dock!) Diane Lane does three careers' worth of acting in the scene where Connie takes the train home from the first hook-up . Her face cycles through excitement, embarrassment, fear, and desire. (Can you believe she lost the Oscar to Nicole Kidman's bad prosthetic nose in the historically bland The Hours ?)

One subtle twist is that nothing really seems wrong with Connie's marriage. You always get the sense that she loves Edward, while she never really learns anything about Paul. The affair is pure lust, and Unfaithful isn't even a proper thriller until the 70-minute mark. Even then, the machinations of violence and paranoia are notably subdued. I'm one of those married psychopaths who enjoys scar-tissue portraits of marriage gone wrong, so I was pleasantly surprised on this rewatch to remember how sharp Gere and Lane are as a couple. Their relatable issues supercharge the melodrama. Circa 2002, I thought Unfaithful was the start of a thoughtful new chapter for Lyne. That didn't happen. In fact, the entire erotic thriller genre basically ended.

I'm curious, Leah, do you think Unfaithful plays any differently today, given how completely this kind of film disappeared in the decade that followed? Also, was 2002 the very last moment when a main character (in this case Connie) could believably never use a cell phone?

LEAH: Diane melting into the phone booth in Grand Central when le garçon tells her to come over! You don't get that on a T-Mobile plan. I think it's more than fair to say that films like this were part of the last gasp of adult dramas at the multiplex; as we well know , Unfaithful came out only a week after the first Spider-Man , though no one could have guessed at the time what a zero-sum game that would eventually be.

I will beg to differ on one point: I think Edward is kind of a creep here. Yes, he's handsome and wealthy and Richard Gere , but the unctuousness of his character, his utter devotion to Connie, also reads weirdly possessive and sort of performative. He thinks it's cute that she has her little auctions and errands to run, but is he really filling up her cup, emotionally? Which is not to say she was remotely justified in running off to eff a Frenchman. But as a married couple they often feel like a relic of a much earlier time — something straight out of Cheever country, this Mad Men world where a wealthy, well-educated wife and mother in her thirties is so adrift that she'll burn a whole day just buying party favors for a child's birthday party. At least in 2022, she'd have a mommy blog or something: Connie the Influencer.

I do wonder if technology played a bigger part in the general decline of films like these than we give it credit for. Or at least whatever made them cinematic; watching movie stars fiendishly scroll through the cloud for evidence of infidelity just doesn't carry the same frisson as hiring a private detective ( we see you, Uncle Junior !) to take artfully framed black-and-white shots of your own cuckolding. Still, Connie chooses her family when it counts; I remember that Lyne said he made the actors come back to reshoot the ending to make it more ambiguous, that bit where she's begging Edward to just run away and start a new life and then it pans out to the police station. What's your take on that final scene — did Edward turn himself in, or do they learn to live with what he's done? And more importantly, how many married people who chose this movie for date night came home and surreptitiously moved any stray snow globes down to the basement?

DARREN: Man, did 21st century technology just make the whole world less cinematic? I'll ponder that question while I consider the ending, which changes every time I watch it. When I saw the movie in theaters, I thought Unfaithful wrapped with a jangled ode to, well, faithfulness: The Sumners healing their rift by sharing an unspeakable sin. They would never mention the whole sex-and-murder thing again; they would spend happy years watching little Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan) grow up to pursue his career as a professional singing bunny. This go-round, Gere's steadily-more-unglued performance made me think conscience nudges Edward into that police station. Either path is bittersweet: a marriage rebuilt via homicide, a murder solved by separation.

I suspect any spouses hunting for a May 2002 date night probably opted for My Big Fat Greek Wedding . Unfaithful made back its budget domestically and did decently abroad, but the business was already changing. The film landed between a Spider-Man and a Star Wars , franchises that still dominate the landscape decades after their origin point. We live among relics, is what I'm saying, so that Cheever quality you're pinpointing doesn't seem too retro to me. Edward might be a bit vacant, but he pays enough attention to catch Connie's lies right away. And Gere plays his cuckold with zero smoothness — even his act of killing seems like a helpless tantrum.

He suffers, though poor Paul certainly suffers much more. Martinez' presence is already a bit of an artifact: Are there still Parisian sculptors who let their rare-book-dealing friends live in downtown lofts? But it's precisely that lush quality — SoHo at its most boho — that gives Unfaithful its surprising edge. Like Connie, we get trapped in an evocative fantasy. (Leah, the soundtrack has instrumental Radiohead! ) The first hour builds a sexy snow globe for the audience. The second hour bashes our head in. That makes Unfaithful an artful send-off, both for a director going on a two-decade furlough and a genre that still hasn't recovered its old prominence. Never forget how deftly the script (credited to Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr.) subverts the usual archetypes. Usually, the nice townsfolk get corrupted by the big city. Here, a genial Manhattanite runs afoul of Westchester's finest, and winds up dead in — horrors! — the suburbs.

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"We waste our money so you don't have to."

"We waste our money, so you don't have to."

Movie Review

US Release Date: 05-10-2002

Directed by: Adrian Lyne

Starring ▸ ▾

• Richard Gere ,  as
• Edward Sumner
• Diane Lane ,  as
• Connie Sumner
• Olivier Martinez ,  as
• Paul Martel
• Erik Per Sullivan ,  as
• Charlie Sumner
• Chad Lowe ,  as
• Dominic Chianese ,  as
• Frank Wilson
• Kate Burton ,  as
• Margaret Colin ,  as
• Zeljko Ivanek ,  as
• John Rothman as

Diane Lane and Richard Gere in Unfaithful .

Unfaithful is a mediocre film with a stellar performance. Richard Gere plays against type and stretches as an actor. It is just too bad the rest of the film is so average.

Gere plays a well to do husband and father. The family lives just out- side of a big city in a very nice suburban home. In an awkwardly staged scene his wife meets a young man in the city. Soon an affair starts. During the day, when the husband is at work and the son is at school, the wife goes into the city to have sex with her lover.

Of course the secret eventually comes out. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Gere's broken hearted husband confronts his wife's lover in the lover's apartment. You watch his character completely melt emotionally as he walks about the place looking at the unmade bed and finds a snow globe that he had once given his wife who had in turn given it to her lover. In a state of complete emotional breakdown he hits the younger man over the head with the globe, killing him.

The rest of the movie plays out with some suspense as the police start asking questions. The wife does not know what happened to her lover. The husband is still wondering why his wife had the affair to begin with.

To me, that last question is the weak part of the movie. The movie never gives a reason for the affair. OK, this guy is younger and supposedly good-looking with a foreign accent. But the movie shows the husband and wife being intimate on several occasions. It is not as if he is neglecting his wife. There is one scene where the spouses are each talking about their own subject while the other is only half listening. If that is reason enough for an affair then I am in big trouble.

The movie ends in a brilliant, although ambiguous scene. The husband and wife are sitting in their SUV upset and crying. They have both confessed to each other and don't know what to do next. As the camera pulls away from the vehicle you see they are parked right next to a police station. Do they go in? It doesn't matter. They are now both devastated, scarred people, who will have to bear for the rest of their lives the guilt they deserve to carry.

This is not a completely well-thought-out movie. However, the performance by Gere is the best I have ever seen him give. 20 Years ago he would have played the part of the young lover. Watch this movie and you see that he has aged not only in years but as an actor as well.

Photos © Copyright 20th Century Fox (2002)

© 2000 - 2017 Three Movie Buffs. All Rights Reserved.

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'Unfaithful' ending explained: Why did Connie suggest fleeing the country?

Updated January 7th, 2021 at 19:24 IST

A lot of cinephiles want the Unfaithful ending explained. The Diane Lane and Richard Gere starrer film presented how an extra-martial affair leads to a murder.

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Unfaithful is a thriller film starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, and Chad Lowe. The 2002 released film performed well at the U.S. box-office but received mixed reviews from the critics but the film turned out to be a successful project for Diane Lane as she bagged nominations for this role at Golden Globes and the Oscars.

Unfaithful presents the journey of a married couple who live in the suburban part of New York with their son. But soon, Diane Lane’s character starts having an affair with a man in New York due to a chance encounter. When Richard Gere finds out about this affair, he murders his wife’s lover. Even though the film has a simple story, its ending confuses many people. So here is  Unfaithful's ending explained.

'Unfaithful' ending explained

Unfaithful starts off with Edward (Gere) and Connie (Lane) as mentioned above live in one New York’s suburban area. During a chance encounter, Connie runs into Paul Martel and in a minor accident, she scrapes her knees. Paul takes Connie to his apartment and tends to her wounds. He starts flirting with her but Connie ignores his advances.

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But when they bump into each other once again, their affair begins. Edward notices a change in his wife and hires a private investigator to follow his wife and he gets to know about Connie’s affair with Paul. When Connie realises that the affair is affecting her family she chooses to meet Paul one last time to end their affair. She sees Paul with another girl and breaks things up with him. Within a difference of a few seconds, Edward visit’s Paul’s apartment to confront him. He notices the snow globe he gifted Connie at Paul’s place and ends up hitting the same on Paul’s head and killing him instantly.

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Ending of 'Unfaithful' explained

After hitting Paul with the snow globe, Edward cleans up all the evidence and leaves the apartment. He also dumps Paul’s body at a landfill and even deletes Connie’s message on Paul’s intercom. A few days later, the police visit Connie and Edward’s house for Paul’s missing report investigation filed by his wife. Connie lies to the police and Edward also support her lie, thus Connie learns that Edward knows about their affair. One night, Edward stops at a traffic signal and Connie asks him if they should flee the country. But it turns out that Edward has stopped his car in front of a police station to confess his crime. 

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Published January 7th, 2021 at 19:24 IST

Home > Unfaithful Ending Explained

• Unfaithful Ending Explained
• UPDATED: September 21, 2023

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Unfaithful Ending Explained: A Shocking Twist That Leaves Viewers Speechless

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

The movie “Unfaithful” is a gripping tale of love, betrayal, and the consequences of one’s actions. Directed by Adrian Lyne and released in 2002, the film follows the life of Connie Sumner (played by Diane Lane), a seemingly happy wife and mother who embarks on a passionate affair with a mysterious stranger named Paul Martel (played by Olivier Martinez).

Throughout the film, viewers are taken on an emotional rollercoaster as they witness Connie’s internal struggle between her love for her husband Edward (played by Richard Gere) and her undeniable attraction to Paul. As the affair intensifies, tensions rise, and Connie finds herself torn between two worlds.

The ending of “Unfaithful” is nothing short of shocking. After an intense confrontation between Edward and Paul, where Edward discovers the truth about his wife’s infidelity, tragedy strikes. In a fit of rage and despair, Edward confronts Paul at his apartment and ends up accidentally killing him in a moment of heated passion.

This unexpected turn of events leaves viewers stunned and questioning everything they thought they knew about the characters involved. The film takes an unexpected dark twist, delving into themes of guilt, remorse, and the consequences of one’s actions.

But what does this ending truly mean? What message is the director trying to convey?

One interpretation is that “Unfaithful” serves as a cautionary tale about the destructive power of infidelity. It shows how one impulsive decision can spiral out of control and have far-reaching consequences. Connie’s affair not only destroys her marriage but also leads to the death of another person. The ending serves as a reminder that actions have consequences and that sometimes there is no turning back from the choices we make.

Another interpretation is that the ending highlights the complexity of human emotions and the blurred lines between love and obsession. Connie’s affair with Paul is not simply about lust or desire; it is a reflection of her own inner turmoil and dissatisfaction with her life. The ending showcases the destructive nature of unchecked emotions and the lengths people will go to protect what they believe they love.

The ending of “Unfaithful” also raises questions about the nature of forgiveness and redemption. Can one truly be forgiven for their transgressions, no matter how grave? Connie’s actions have irreversibly changed the lives of those around her, including her husband and herself. The film leaves viewers pondering whether redemption is possible for someone who has caused so much pain.

In conclusion, the ending of “Unfaithful” is a shocking twist that leaves viewers speechless. It forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature, love, betrayal, and the consequences of our actions. Whether you interpret it as a cautionary tale or a reflection on the complexities of human emotions, one thing is certain: this ending will stay with you long after the credits roll.

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The 9 best movies on Netflix in June

• Watch Netflix original "Hit Man," starring Glen Powell, in June.
• Favorites like "Crazy Rich Asians" and "La La Land" are also on the streamer this month.
• We also recommend "Tangerine" and Will Smith in "Ali."

Here are the best movies coming to Netflix in June.

“Ali” (June 1)

Will Smith gives one of the best performances of his career playing the iconic heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. From his physical transformation to look like the champ to his voice and swagger, Smith pulls off everything needed to make an impressive Ali biopic.

But perhaps his greatest achievement is his collaboration with director Michael Mann to showcase the complexities of the man who, at the peak of his skills, was also fighting criticisms about his religious faith, opposing the Vietnam War, and infidelity.

“The Breakfast Club” (June 1)

John Hughes' masterpiece made stars Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald , and Ally Sheedy — the poster kids for 1980s teen rebellion.

Following five high schoolers serving Saturday detention, Hughes unlocks the adolescent struggles of that time as he makes each character the complete opposite of the other, resulting in a powderkeg of emotions that is still powerful to watch on screen today.

“The Conjuring” (June 1)

If you're looking for a good scare, watch James Wan's supernatural horror, which follows paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.

If you want to explore the "The Conjuring" universe further, "The Conjuring 2," and the third movie, " The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It ," are also available.

“Dune” (June 1)

If you want to see how " Dune " was adapted for the big screen before Denis Villeneuve's big-screen spectacle, check out David Lynch's wacky 1984 release.

Get ready for many questionable 1980s-era special effects, creepy characters, and a pug (no, a dog never appears in the book).

“La La Land” (June 1)

If you need a feel-good movie, you can't go wrong with Damien Chazelle's musical love story.

From the beautiful Los Angeles settings and dazzling set pieces, "La La Land" is topped with performances by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, who play two people who fall in love in LA but eventually realize their true love is the arts.

“The Lego Movie”

Directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord's comedy talents are fully displayed in "The Lego Movie." They use a clever story with the geekiest elements of the Lego line to create this perfect animated comedy that has the rare ability to work for both kids and adults.

“Tangerine”

Watch one of the best movies in recent Palme d'Or winner Sean Baker's filmography.

This comedy follows a transgender sex worker who discovers her pimp boyfriend has been unfaithful, so she goes in search of answers with her friend in a hilarious trek through LA on Christmas Eve.

Along with the talents on screen, Baker shows off as the entire movie was shot on a few iPhones.

“Crazy Rich Asians” (June 6)

Jon M. Chu's beloved adaptation of the Kevin Kwan book made leads Henry Golding and Constance Wu into stars and introduced us to the comedy talents of Awkwafina.

Released in 2018, when studios rarely released romantic comedies, "Crazy Rich Asians" showed that they can still strike a chord with audiences when done correctly. And this one certainly does that with the chemistry between Golding and Wu, the focus on family and tradition, and the beautiful Singapore scenary.

“Hit Man” (June 7)

The love affair with Glen Powell continues with this action rom-com from a script written by Powell and director Richard Linklater.

Based on a true story, Powell plays a part-time staffer at the New Orleans Police Department who poses undercover as a hitman in sting operations where those who hire him are arrested.

Powell is hilarious as the Gary character, who dresses in wild costumes and uses weird voices to elevate his undercover work. But things get complicated when he falls for a woman (Adria Arjona) who hires him to kill her abusive husband.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

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Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

In the middle of the twentieth century Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were kings of American culture. Almost two thirds of the country tuned in on March 31, 1957, to watch the live broadcast of their made-for-television musical Cinderella —expanding the dominion they had established over the previous fourteen years on Broadway with Oklahoma! , Carousel , South Pacific , and The King and I . Critically acclaimed, popular, and obscenely lucrative, these shows effected a sea change in American musical theater from musical comedy (songs, jokes, and dance loosely collected around a plot) to the musical play (character-driven songs and sometimes dance integrated into a coherent story) that Rodgers and Hammerstein invented.

But by the time of their final work together— The Sound of Music , which debuted in 1959, the year before Hammerstein died of cancer—a critical backlash had begun. Hammerstein’s plainspoken lyrics, centered on love and optimism, full of raindrops on roses and sometimes as corny as Kansas in August, were derided as unsophisticated, sentimental, square. The Rodgers and Hammerstein model was soon usurped by new modes, especially those of the more jaded, ironic, and formally adventurous work of Hammerstein’s protégé, Stephen Sondheim. The American musical became less widely popular. More recently, the art and lives of Rodgers and Hammerstein have undergone the scrutiny applied to many other once-revered white men and their once-central work. Their musicals are still frequently performed, still seen and heard and loved, but in this censorious era their reputations have been unsettled.

This is why Laurie Winer’s recent biography, Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical , starts on the defensive. In an introduction titled “An Unfashionable Take on an Unfashionable Man,” Winer, a critic who calls theater her religion, swings somewhat wildly at various criticisms of her subject: that his lyrics are artless; that he was a naif, blind to dark truths; that he was villainously greedy; that he was dully inferior to Rodgers’s first lyricist partner, Lorenz Hart. These are mostly straw men, and as Winer gets needlessly entangled in the “great man” theory of history and the philosophical pragmatism of William James, the strain makes for an anxious and off-putting start to what turns out to be a smart and insightful book.

Clearly, Winer has read all the other books on the subject, studied all the shows, pored over the reams of letters Hammerstein left behind. 1 Compared with a more foursquare take like Todd Purdum’s well-researched, well-organized Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution (2018), Winer’s is digressive and scattershot. But she has an intuitive grasp of Hammerstein’s aesthetic and character. She gets him. Looking back at his old-fashioned virtues and failings from a distance, like a wised-up but affectionate grandchild, she helps us see, as she puts it, “the mortal who made the immortal work” as “a man of his time, if not entirely for ours.”

Winer presents Hammerstein as “a classic fortunate son…petted and loved almost from the cradle to the grave.” His paternal grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein I, was a “flamboyant impresario,” a German immigrant to New York who made money in cigars and spent it all on opera and opera houses. His father managed a major vaudeville theater. Oscar II, born in 1895, was close to his mother, who died from an infection following a botched abortion when he was fifteen. “From then on Hammerstein opposed grief as a matter of principle,” Winer writes. His life and work were about looking past that kind of pain, walking through the storm with your head up high.

At Columbia University in the 1910s, Hammerstein was already writing for the Varsity Show, and soon he quit law school to join the family business as a playwright and librettist. The libretti, or books, of the musical comedies of the time were slapdash. “What counted was the music and the jokes and the talents of the cast,” Hammerstein explained in an interview. “We accepted the book as a device for leading into songs.”

Working with the more experienced librettist Otto Harbach, Hammerstein learned the conventions of the day, but Harbach also taught him to construct his stories with care. They worked mainly in operetta, then a popular mode, with plots and manners imported from Europe, and found much box office success. But Hammerstein longed for something else, more operatic than musical comedy but more believable than opera, and American in theme and style. That’s what he created in 1927 with the composer Jerome Kern: Show Boat .

Winer calls Show Boat “the most revolutionary show in the history of the genre,” which isn’t hyperbole but a standard judgment. In its epic scope, realist treatment of a weighty American subject (one of the weightiest, race), and sophisticated intertwining of music and story, Show Boat radically expanded the aesthetic possibilities of the American musical. Winer illuminates Hammerstein’s achievement by explaining how deftly he adapted Edna Ferber’s thick novel about the white and Black employees of a Mississippi River showboat, finding ways for the story to be coherent and songful, partly by choosing scenes in which the characters have reasons to sing. For the first hour, she writes, “a listener may be hardly aware of the difference between music, lyrics, and dialogue.” Hammerstein’s altered ending, “a deeply emotional masterpiece of theatricality,” tilts toward redemption by reuniting the estranged central couple and reprising the score’s deepest song, “Ol’ Man River.”

How to account for this leap in artistry? Winer, in the spirit of her subject, pegs it to falling in love. In March 1927, on the deck of a luxury liner bound for London, the thirty-one-year-old Hammerstein, traveling without his wife, Myra, met and felt an instant connection to the twenty-eight-year-old actress Dorothy Jacobson, already on her second marriage. It was some enchanted morning. During the two years it took for them to detach from their spouses, Hammerstein learned that Myra had been unfaithful, news that sent him into a sanatorium for a few weeks. But by 1929 he and Dorothy were wed, and he had found a version of matrimonial contentment a little more complicated than what he would depict in his shows but nevertheless true and lasting.

The achievement of Show Boat , however, did not immediately lead to professional satisfaction. He spent much of the 1930s in Hollywood, subject to the whims of studio producers, cycling through ambitious hope and disillusionment. “Because his gift was for narrative integrity, Hammerstein was destined to be ground up by the filmmaking process,” Winer writes astutely. He returned to Broadway, but with a flop. Quoting Hammerstein’s advice-filled letters to colleagues and family members, Winer shows him staying determinedly buoyant. That whistle-a-happy-tune buoyancy, Winer writes, would “become the standard engine of the musical play.”

Richard Rodgers didn’t have to learn the same lessons. A few years younger than Hammerstein, he teamed up with Lorenz Hart while an undergrad at Columbia in 1920. Almost immediately they started creating a large portion of what became the American Songbook, Rodgers’s fecund musical gifts (“He pees melody,” quipped Noël Coward) married to Hart’s rueful wit. Though in 1930s Hollywood they faced frustrations similar to Hammerstein’s, their return to Broadway produced hit show after hit show— Babes in Arms , Pal Joey —packed with hit songs like “My Funny Valentine.” The trouble was Hart, a closeted gay man who drowned his self-loathing in booze. Rodgers wanted a more stable partner and a librettist-lyricist of greater substance. Hammerstein, despite his recent failures, fit the description.

With Oklahoma! , they picked up on the precedent of Show Boat and popularized the kind of musical that followed Hammerstein’s maxim: “The song is the servant of the play.” Where most musicals had opened with pretty chorus girls, this one started with a lone cowboy singing about a bright golden haze on the meadow. Hammerstein’s simple lyrics, much less sparkling when read than Hart’s or Cole Porter’s, took flight on Rodgers’s lilting, instantly memorable melodies. Integrating words and music into a dramatic form more like a play, the team produced a show that would prove much more durable than most of the flimsy musicals that preceded it.

Winer retells the usual story of this period, during which the team pushed their style further in the unlikely Carousel , with its unpromising subject matter (theft, spousal abuse, parental neglect) and sustained musical scenes. She registers their aesthetic retreat after the unpopular experiment Allegro— which follows a doctor from birth and childhood through marriage, medical school, and middle age, using abstract sets and a Greek chorus — and notes the way their partnership came to resemble a corporation. More originally, she addresses now troubling aspects of each major Hammerstein work by describing and discussing recent productions, like Nicholas Hytner’s 1992 Carousel , which helped revive the team’s reputation, and the darkly revisionist Oklahoma! that Daniel Fish directed on Broadway in 2019, demonstrating that the shows still find audiences while examining how directors adjust to contemporary mores.

Winer doesn’t go easy on Hammerstein. She recognizes the pervasive orientalism in his stories and songs. She’s forthright about Carmen Jones , the all-Black adaptation of the Bizet opera Carmen that he made without Rodgers, flagging “racism of which he is entirely unaware,” a condescension that “bleeds into the show in all kinds of ways.” She calls out the absurdity in Allegro —“so blithe in its assumptions about gender roles that it could have been written before the author was born”—quoting the lyrics that suggest a fellow needs a girl “To sit by his side/And listen to him talk/And agree with the things he’ll say.” Winer sees her subject as a man who “never conceived of or condoned a life lived outside the system, for he was too much a beneficiary of it.”

Recognizing Hammerstein’s limitations, Winer is better able to help us appreciate his gifts. She accurately identifies him as “a poet of the anticipation of joy.” This is the special meaning of one of the most common words in his lexicon: dream . In “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” “I Have Dreamed,” and many more songs, the important pleasure is proleptic, imagined in advance. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

Despite the gender assumptions in Allegro , Winer sees the other social commentary in the show, poking fun at the sped-up shallowness of modern life, as the kind “at which Hammerstein excelled: recognizably true and spooned out softly enough so that each member of the audience can be sure it’s about someone else.” She similarly appreciates the calibration of criticism and comfort in South Pacific , whose white American characters have to confront their own racism, as in the then-controversial song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which locates the origin of racial hatred in the indoctrination of children. The show, she writes, “brilliantly reassures us of our essential decency, and only then does it make its statement—that, unless we are vigilant about the enemy within, our decency as well as our democracy can be lost.” Hammerstein, she says, “knew how to challenge with one hand and give tribute with the other.”

While Winer’s book isn’t hagiography, it is, like its subject, in favor of redemption. About Carousel , which Winer calls “a treatise on the messiness of forgiveness,” she writes that “our tears fall as an answer to the ever-evolving question: Can we forgive ourselves, each other, and the artists who still have something to say, no matter how imperfect we all might be?” She’s careful to emphasize Hammerstein’s late-life advocacy against housing discrimination and she stresses, over and over, that his work “appeals to the best in human nature.”

Throughout, Winer keeps Hammerstein in a more flattering light by contrasting him with Rodgers. Yes, both were complicit in cheating the director Joshua Logan out of author royalties for South Pacific , which they wrote together, but Winer spends pages detailing Rodgers’s cruelty to Logan, who worshiped him, and his minimization of Logan’s contributions even decades later. Yes, Hammerstein seems to have had a late-career dalliance with Temple Texas, a chorus girl half his age, but what’s that in comparison to the ever-randy Rodgers, who, as the choreographer Agnes de Mille memorably phrased it, used women “like a piece of toilet paper”?

Winer gives attention to the men’s wives, both interior designers named Dorothy, and to their parenting. Yes, Hammerstein “practiced the noblesse oblige style of 1940s upper-class fathering,” and according to his son Billy could express love only in his work. But such fault-finding pales next to that of Rodgers’s daughter Mary. Here she is on the time her father was having an affair with an actress in The King and I , in a room at the theater he always had reserved for such purposes, when he made that actress late for rehearsal: “He promised to cover for her but didn’t and she was fired. Shitty way to treat someone you supposedly cared about. To say nothing of your wife.”

There’s a lot more where that comes from in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers . Where Winer’s book starts on defense, Rodgers’s kicks off on the attack, scoring points while describing an ear-training game that her father played with her and her sister, Linda:

I later learned that this was a routine exercise in elementary music theory classes, universally considered boring. But Linda and I liked it because Daddy seemed to like us when we answered correctly. And to like himself for having taught us so well. Neither of which likings we saw much evidence of otherwise.

“What I wanted, desperately, was my parents’ affection, but it wasn’t there to be gotten,” she says. Her father “hated having his time wasted with intangible things like emotions.” Her mother, “even more fanatical about appearances than he,” was “frozen,” a pampered and antisemitic Jew, a controlling hypocrite who hid secrets like her husband’s infidelity and alcoholism behind an elegant façade. “Pretense, lies, hypocrisy,” Rodgers writes. “Put it in Latin and you’ve got a family crest.”

This is the sound of Shy : pull-no-punches, punch line after punch line. It is essentially an edited transcript of Rodgers, who died in 2014, recounting her life to Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times . Green arranged the results and added footnotes that identify people and keep a parallel stream of jokes flowing along the bottom of the pages. One self-aware bit down there proposes alternative titles for the book. “Where Was I?” mocks the conversational rambling that is part of the book’s charm. “What Do You Really Think?” is a deadpan comment on what Green calls Rodgers’s “knee-jerk transparency.”

Shy is much more than a daughter’s memoir. Mary Rodgers was herself an accomplished musical theater composer. The ironic title comes from an ironic song in Once Upon a Mattress , her popular 1958 musical adaptation of The Princess and the Pea . (The recent City Center Encores! revival of this terrific show, headed to Broadway this summer, is a reminder of her abundant talent.) Rodgers describes the show’s heroine, a breakout role for Carol Burnett, as

a big, awkward, loudmouth princess, born to royalty but nevertheless a misfit, likable but unsure of herself. Despite her exalted provenance, she has to outwit a vain and icy queen to get what she wants and live happily ever after.

The kicker: “Story of my life.”

The sections about the creation of that show have all the excitement, all the love of theater and theater people, that you find in classic showbiz memoirs, except that the frazzled artist finding her voice and struggling to get her songs heard is a divorced mother of three who needs a babysitter. Along with the dryly delivered insider dish on the sex, drugs, and secrets of her milieu, much of the fascination and import of Shy lies in the exceedingly rare perspective of a woman in an industry dominated by men like her father (who always encouraged her composing).

Compared with the story of her father’s career, hers is a struggle all the way through, with more bombs and never-produced projects than successes. Her version of Hammerstein’s fortunate-son buoyancy is “learning to swerve.” That’s how she found a second career as a writer of children’s books, including Freaky Friday , a swerve that led to another—writing screenplays in Hollywood, an episode she calls the “most mortifying” part of her tale. At least that she had in common with Hammerstein (whom she calls kind, generous, principled, but “no saint”).

Hers is the messy, affecting story of a woman in the postwar period, “a woman who tried everything,” stumbling to find “more honest ways to live.” She married a closeted gay man (“everyone should marry a gay man at least once”) and divorced him after he started hitting her. She slept around (her phrase) and almost married some other gay men. She, who considered childhood “the most miserable punishment exacted upon anybody,” had a total of six children. 2 When, more than halfway through the book, she settles into a lasting second marriage, to the film executive and theater producer Henry Guettel, she aptly describes it as “like finding your way home in a song, after the bridge.”

In her eighties, armed with hindsight and wisdom, she’s as tough on herself as she is on everyone else, calling out her own bad behavior, delusions, and complicity. But she’s also forgiving, or at least understanding. She acknowledges that her parents generally did the right thing during the big crises in her life, even if “it doesn’t even out” because “there weren’t as many big things as little.”

Shy puts on the page a person in full, and its cumulative message is what Green says Rodgers wanted it to be: “You could have a good life without being dull and without being perfect or great.” Still, the book has a special spark whenever it touches on a certain male genius of musical theater. Not Richard Rogers. Stephen Sondheim.

“The love of my life” is what she calls Sondheim. They met in 1944 at the Hammersteins’ farm in Pennsylvania, where Sondheim, who lived nearby and was friends with one of the Hammerstein boys, spent so much time that he was practically adopted. 3 He was fourteen, Mary thirteen. Watching the brilliant boy beat her at chess and show off on the piano, Mary was enchanted. “I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again. Which turned out to be true.”

As young adults, they became friends and wrote music together. They were gossiping under her father’s piano when Sondheim told her he was probably gay. As she married and divorced and played the field, she found other men wanting because they weren’t him. Eventually, when they both were around thirty, she wrote him a “shit-or-get-off-the-pot letter,” and they entered what she calls a trial marriage.

This is no doubt the juiciest revelation in the book, and it is a sad, painful episode: the two of them, side by side in bed, doing nothing; Mary sneaking home in the morning before her kids woke up. He wasn’t in love with her, she says. She wasn’t physically attracted to him. “I just loved him, thoroughly enough for nothing else to matter. Do you not believe in that? Have you never seen Carousel ?” It couldn’t work. She swerved on with her life.

But they stayed friends. It was she who pushed Sondheim together with her father after the death of Hammerstein, who had been Sondheim’s surrogate father and most important mentor. A Rodgers–Sondheim collaboration was also Hammerstein’s expressed wish. It turned out to be acrimonious, and the resulting show, Do I Hear a Waltz? , was middling, but it did occasion from Sondheim some wickedly cynical, Hart-like lyrics about falsity in marriages like that of the Rodgerses. 4

Soon after, when Sondheim was writing a show about marriage and commitment, he needed to learn from someone with experience, so he talked with Mary and took notes. Her attitudes toward marriage—hers, her parents’, and maybe whatever she and Sondheim had, the attitudes we hear in Shy —are all over his acerbic lyrics for Company , which was to the 1970s concept musical what Oklahoma! was to the musical play. 5

Which is to say that all this gossip about marriages, including the metaphorical marriages of lyricists and composers, and all this griping about parents—all this illuminates the development of the American musical. One of the best chapters in Winer’s book about Hammerstein is mainly about Sondheim, whose “responses to Hammerstein’s work,” she writes, “constitute the most productive Oedipal impulse in the history of musical theater.” As she notes, there are many echoes of the poet of anticipation and community in the poet of ambivalence and alienation: Sondheim’s “No One Is Alone” speaks to Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone”; “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” is a father of Sondheim’s “Children Will Listen.”

Sondheim famously called Hammerstein a man of limited talent and unlimited soul, and Rodgers the reverse. But Sondheim was also, in later years, the chief advocate for Hammerstein’s artistry—arguing that he should be seen as an experimental playwright; that his painstaking lyrics, despite diction and sentimentality left over from operetta, have weight.

“The most important ingredient of a good song is sincerity,” Hammerstein advised in his “Notes on Lyrics.” For him, sophistication was a false pose. “If you do find something exciting,” he advised his daughter in a letter, “it is silly to make believe you don’t .” He preferred characters that he considered “primitive”—cowboys, carnival barkers, Black and Asian people—because he thought that they say what they mean. “There’s nothing wrong with sentiment,” he said, “because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life.” That earnestness is easy to mock.

Or to distrust. For Mary Rodgers and Sondheim and many of their generation, afraid of sentimentality, the happy talk that Hammerstein considered sincere could sound like pretense, lies, hypocrisy. But her knee-jerk transparency—“Make it funnier,” she told Green, and “make it meaner”—is equally a kind of sincerity. “The real reason to tell the truth, or truth within reason, is that it’s healthier for everyone,” she says.

There’s something here at the heart of many debates about musical theater, whether Hart versus Hammerstein or Hammerstein versus Sondheim, debates about what to believe and what to make believe. As Winer puts it, defending her love of Hammerstein, “One woman’s profundity is another’s useless sentimentality.” One generation’s sincerity is another’s artifice. Sophistication isn’t always a pose. It can be a condition: the old pathways to the heart are closed and new ones must be found. Each generation, searching for more honest ways to live and make art, mocks its biological and artistic parents, resolving to be their opposite and failing.

Then again, to dwell on these debates about language might be to miss the point, like reading “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” without the transfiguring tune. Speaking for herself—but not only for herself—Mary Rodgers explains why she always forgave her father: “It was all about his music; everything loving about him came out in it, and there was no point looking anywhere else. It’s also true I didn’t have any choice—but it was enough.”

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Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue

Brian Seibert is the author of What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing . He teaches at Yale. (June 2024)

See The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II , compiled and edited by Mark Eden Horowitz (Oxford University Press, 2022).  ↩

One died at three. Another, Adam Guettel, took up the family business as composer-lyricist. His music for The Light in the Piazza won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Original Score. His Days of Wine and Roses was on Broadway earlier this year.  ↩

Sondheim also had a narcissistic mother to flee, one who later wrote him that her only regret was giving birth to him.   ↩

Dorothy Rodgers, in her daughter’s words, “sniffed a satire too close to home” and turned her husband against the song, which Sondheim then self-bowdlerized. Sondheim includes both versions in the first of his two invaluable books about his lyrics, Finishing the Hat (Knopf, 2010).   ↩

It’s also surely not a coincidence that the lovelorn “best pal” character in Sondheim’s growing-up-in-showbiz musical Merrily We Roll Along (now on Broadway) is named Mary.  ↩

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How to ‘Gray Rock’ Conversations With Difficult People

Some say that becoming as dull as a rock is an effective way to disengage.

By Christina Caron

Take a moment to imagine a small gray rock sitting in the palm of your hand. It’s silent, smooth and otherwise unremarkable.

Are you bored yet? If so, that’s kind of the point.

Most people will eventually lose interest in a dull piece of granite. So there’s a theory percolating online that if you adopt the qualities of a stone, becoming impassive and bland, then you will repel the argumentative, antagonistic people in your life who are itching for conflict.

It’s called the “gray rock” method, and over the last decade it has spread on social media, including among TikTok influencers, who have shared strategies to channel your inner rock. It even surfaced on a recent episode of the reality show “Vanderpump Rules,” when a cast member, Ariana Madix, said that using the technique had helped her avoid toxic interactions with her ex-boyfriend, Tom Sandoval, who had been unfaithful.

The goal of the gray rock technique is to disengage without ending contact, said Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and the author of “It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing From Narcissistic People.” People who gray rock remain neutral, keep their interactions “trim and slim,” and avoid sharing information that could potentially be turned against them, she added.

But while some psychologists say that the method is helpful under certain circumstances, it isn’t always the right solution.

How does ‘gray rocking’ work?

There isn’t an official set of rules for gray rocking. The method has not been studied, nor is it derived from an evidence-based psychological practice.

But, in general, you can think of gray rocking as a form of emotional disengagement, Dr. Durvasula said.

Antagonistic people are usually looking for a fight, she added, and gray rocking can be one way to keep the peace and avoid “getting into the mud with them.”

It is especially effective in written communication, like texting, as a way of avoiding long, meandering messages, she said. The strategy can also be useful at work, she added, where concise communication is often valued.

Many variations on gray rocking exist. One communication coach on TikTok demonstrated various ways to avoid being “overly icy or awkward,” a process she calls “soft gray rocking.” For example, she said, if someone asks you how a job search is going, instead of explaining how hard it has been you can talk about the different networking events you’ve attended.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, conversations can become heated. If the person with whom you’re interacting remains disrespectful, dishonest or manipulative, then you may be better off severing contact, Dr. Durvasula said. But not everybody can do that immediately, especially if the relationship involves a close family member or a spouse.

Tina Swithin, the founder of One Mom’s Battle, a website and online community for people who are divorcing someone with narcissistic tendencies, recommends the “yellow rock” technique, particularly when coparenting.

Unlike the gray rock, which is “cool to the touch and a bit aloof,” the yellow rock “has an air of friendliness,” she wrote in her guide for parents navigating the family court system.

According to Ms. Swithin, a person using the yellow rock technique might say: “While I do not agree with you, you have every right to feel the way you do.” Or: “I’m hoping we can both take time away from this topic to regroup as we are not going in a positive or productive direction. Let’s revisit this next week.”

Where did the concept come from?

While Dr. Durvasula counsels clients in her private practice on how best to use the technique — and has even given away gray rocks as gifts during book signings — she didn’t learn about the method in school. Rather, gray rocking seems to have been created outside the realm of psychology. To her best recollection, Dr. Durvasula had stumbled upon the terminology online, more than a decade ago, she said.

One of the earliest references appears on the website Love Fraud, which is run by Donna Andersen.

Ms. Andersen said she created Love Fraud in 2005 to warn others about con artists and psychopaths after she said her then-husband had stolen a quarter-million dollars and had numerous affairs.

In 2012, one member of her online community, who chose to remain anonymous, wrote an essay titled “The Gray Rock method of dealing with psychopaths.” If breaking contact is impossible, the essay advised, one escape strategy is to give dull, monotonous responses during a conversation.

“Psychopaths are addicted to drama, and they can’t stand to be bored,” the writer continued.

When should you try to gray rock?

Lara Fielding, a behavioral psychologist in St. Helena, Calif., and the author of “Mastering Adulthood,” cautioned against using gray rocking for long periods of time.

“I would call this a distress tolerance technique,” she said, best reserved for when you’re in crisis mode. Sometimes, she added, you “do what you need to do to not make the situation worse.”

But, over time, gray rocking can become ineffective, she added, “because you are cutting yourself off from your authentic feelings — essentially denying your own needs.”

If you decide to do it, she said, ask yourself three questions: First, is it effective? Second, how long can I do this before it harms me? And third, am I working to solve the problem if I have to do this very often?

In some cases, the person you’re gray rocking might become aggravated that you aren’t speaking to them as you normally would, leading to more tension, Dr. Durvasula said.

If you want to maintain this relationship, the V.A.R. method , which stands for Validate, Assert and Reinforce, can potentially help establish boundaries and de-escalate the situation.

Dr. Fielding offered these examples:

Validate: “I see that this is upsetting you.”

Assert: “At the same time, this discussion is stressing me out a bit. So could we take a break and come back to it?”

Reinforce: “If we can take a little break or if you could bring your voice down a bit, I will be able to hear you better.”

Christina Caron is a Times reporter covering mental health. More about Christina Caron

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