In Love with My Partner’s Wife is a story as old as time. Boy meets girl. Girl becomes boy’s battered trophy wife. Boy turns out to be a crooked cop on a drug lord’s payroll. Girl develops Addison’s disease. Boy has a partner who’s a total boy scout. Girl meets boy scout. Boy scout falls in love with partner’s wife. It’s the circle of life.
Detective Frank Miller (Jonathan Stoddard) and his sexy wife Eve (Gina Vitori) live in a veritable mansion that he can afford because of the “stock market” — or so he says; in reality, Frank’s getting his palm greased by “drug dealer” Callaghan (Corbin Timbrook). Or maybe he saved up all that comic book money.
Frank and Eve invite Frank’s partner, Detective Paul Ford (Andrew Spach), to their palace. After dinner, Paul and Eve admire a cute little drawing of a panda, no doubt a testament to Frank and Eve’s five-year-old kid’s artistic potential.
Oh wait, they don’t have children; that’s one of Eve’s “paintings.” In that case, that’s one sorry-looking panda. It reminds me of Will teaching Jack how to draw a penguin; “you just gotta start with Paul Giamatti and then… stop there.”
Nonetheless, Paul says it’s “beautiful.” Jeez, we already know from the title that you fancy this girl — there’s no need to overdo it. Frank joins them and calls the picture “depressing,” adding that “silly paintings like this, makes the house look cheap.” He then takes the painting down. Ha!
This is supposed to make Frank look like a jerk, but then he’s not wrong (and if someone knows about visual arts, that’s Frank Miller). What does qualify as a dick move is Frank constantly ordering Eve to “clean up” their already spotless house.
He might as well be asking her to ‘get rid of those sideburns.’ When Eve fails to meet Frank’s superlative standards for tidiness, he roughs her up. A little bit. Offscreen. It’s only a couple of bruises below the neck.
I’m not saying that’s not bad, but surely Eve must be rationalizing to herself that it isn’t that bad. Otherwise, how else to explain that she stays put? She makes as if she’s going to leave, but all it takes to get her stay is one “I love you” text message (Pop-Up Texting has the opposite effect on me).
Again, a couple of bruises is bad, but what the movie is seemingly foreshadowing is that it’s going to take a lot worse before Eve gets to the point where that’s all she can stands and she can’t stands no more — and isn’t that how it unfortunately goes? How many women stick around until it may be too late?
There’s no payoff to any of that, however, because none of it was intentional. The filmmakers were never fixing to, for lack of a better term, ‘empower’ Eve; on the contrary, they were grooming her to become a run-of-the-mill damsel in distress. Accordingly, the reason that Frank’s abuse of Eve doesn’t escalate is that Paul rescues her. That is to say, she doesn’t leave Frank; she leaves with Paul.
Let’s think about that for a second. Eve’s deliverance from a chauvinistic bully hinges on another man finding her attractive. Incredibly, this film was written and directed by women. What if Eve wasn’t Paul’s type? I guess she’d be screwed then.
And then there’s the implication that a woman can’t be alone. If she has a bad man, she had better get a good one, but God forbid that she be on her own for any length of time without a boyfriend/spouse telling her what to do or what not to do — or, in this case, to paint or not paint.
Moreover, are we really meant to believe that Eve is going to go from intimate partner violence with Frank straight to happily-ever-after with Paul just like that? That’s like sending a concussed player back into the field and expect him to score a touchdown.
All things considered, the whole domestic abuse thing is nothing more than an afterthought; a plot device to set up the generic thriller portion of the movie — wherein Frank frames both Paul and Eve (he tells her doctor that she’s been “been selling [her] steroids to high school athletes”), causing Paul and Eve to race against the clock to prove his innocence and expose Frank’s deception in time to get Eve her medication. Also, more pandas.