In the 1970s, Alan J. Pakula was a highly esteemed director of intelligent thrillers, many of which had captured the paranoid spirit of the times. In the 1990s, Pakula's thrillers ceased to appear that intelligent, and they usually had very little to do with the spirit of the times. One example of this could be found in Pakula's 1992 film Consenting Adults.
The premise behind Matthew Chapman's script is intriguing – 40-something music jingle writer Richard Parker (played by Kevin Kline) and his wife Priscilla (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are happily married, and with their daughter Lori (played by Kimberley McCullough), seem to embody family bliss. Yet, the Parkers are dissatisfied with the monotony and predictability of their everyday life. That monotony is interrupted with the arrival of another couple to the neighbourhood - free-spirited Eddy Otis (played by Kevin Spacey) and his attractive wife Kay (played by Rebecca Miller). The two couples befriend each other, and Eddy cannot fail to notice his new friend Richard being attracted to his wife. One day, he suggests that the two men engage in wife-swapping, and Richard agrees, not knowing that the consequences of his actions would be much more severe than he has imagined.
Kline, Spacey and Mastrantonio are well-respected actors, but they all seem miscast in this film. During the set-up, Pakula tries his best to present Consenting Adults as some sort of serious drama about hedonism, fidelity, new sexual morals and other issues that were supposed to be "hip" in the early 1990s. He fails in doing so because even less experienced viewers would quickly recognise signs of a typical early 1990s thriller in which a seemingly nice stranger turns into an evildoer or psychopath. When this happens, it does so in the most unsatisfactory manner, and the second half of the film features plenty of preposterous plot twists that would make any suspension of disbelief impossible. The ending, which features Spacey wielding an Uzi submachine gun, could have made this film into an unintentional parody of itself; instead, it only reminds the audience of the lacking humour. Due to Pakula's inability to reconcile his style with the script's flaws, Consenting Adults is an unpleasant film to watch; even the sex scenes are totally un-erotic, and their only purpose is to include some adult content in a film that would otherwise treat the audience like little children.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on December 23rd 2003)
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