'Metroland' Next Stop, Dullsville By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 30, 1999

Emily Watson and Christian Bale play a couple whose quiet existence is put at risk. (Lions Gate) Director: Philip Saville Cast: Christian Bale; Lee Ross; Emily Watson; Elsa Zylberstein; Jonathan Aris Running Time: 1 hour, 39 minutes Contains sex, nudity, profanity and drug use

The good news is this: Christian Bale and Emily Watson are excellent actors in their portrayal of Chris and Marion, a middle-class British couple whose safe marriage and quiet existence in a suburban London bedroom community (derogatively referred to as "Metroland") is threatened by the reappearance of Chris's wild childhood chum Toni (Lee Ross). Toni's sudden surfacing after years of gallivanting abroad makes Chris reconsider the choices he has made in life. Should he keep his office job, stick with Marion and try to rejuvenate their predictable love life or chuck it all to run off with his roguish pal for a wild course of casual sex with a different woman in every port (yes, it is set in 1977).

The bad news is this: Despite a surprising amount of bare bums, the movie is as tame as the person Chris fears he is becoming. It's a thoughtfully constructed story, with nuanced performances all around and even a mild surprise thrown in, but the whole thing feels ever so slightly enervated, like a game of chess between codgers in the park.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing like a rousing game of strategy to get the synapses firing, but the World Wrestling Federation's "War Zone" it's not.

Based on Julian Barnes's novel, "Metroland" picks up in the middle of the match, at a point in Chris and Marion's relationship where the two seem to have reached stalemate – that is until Toni pops up to rearrange the pieces on the board. By way of showing how the situation ever got this bad, the story then flashes back to 1963, when Chris and Toni were rowdy schoolboys with wanderlust in their hearts, vowing to escape Metroland and never return. By the way, Bale and Ross play their 16-year-old selves by donning Beatles wigs and public school uniforms, but fortunately these implausible, soft-focus scenes do not last very long.

After jumping back to 1977, director Philip Saville and writer Adrian Hodges's adaptation again cuts to 1968, when Chris is living an idyllic bohemian existence as a photographer in Paris with a hot French girlfriend named Annick (Elsa Zylberstein). All this is intercut with "present-day" fantasy sequences where Marion can be seen giving Chris permission to have as many affairs as he likes. (You can tell they're not real because she's shown ironing his BVDs.) The period pop songs and Mark Knopfler-composed score are generally unobtrusive – including Knopfler's own, only slightly anachronistic 1979 hit "Sultans of Swing" – and they help to set the many moods and scenes.

It's obvious that Chris envies Toni and his Peter Pan lifestyle. The movie hammers that point home well. What's less obvious is that Toni is also jealous of Chris's staid world: the steady paycheck, the cottage in suburbia, the wife waiting at home.

It's a refreshing and counter-intuitive turnaround, this championing of boredom over the breathtaking, and "Metroland" makes a fairly convincing – if decidedly unmodern – case for it. Where it falters is in inadvertently making a film that feels almost as bland as its protagonist's situation.

The outcome of this chess match may come as a surprise to some, but the satisfactions of its conclusion – which argues that compromise and concession are simply a part of real life and growing up – are still less satisfying than a good, old-fashioned body-slam.