Susan Granger’s review of “I Think I Love My Wife” (Fox Searchlight)
Inspired by French director Eric Rohmer’s 1972 study of temptation and marital fidelity in “Chloe in the Afternoon,” Chris Rock devises a crass mid-life crisis comedy.
Manhattan investment banker Richard Cooper (Chris Rock) seems to have it all: a successful career, a smart, foxy, if prim, schoolteacher wife (Gina Torres) and two terrific kids. But he’s so sex-starved and bored with suburban life that all he can think about is women. Not that he plans to cheat; he just likes to fantasize about lewd ways he could seduce a strange woman. That is – until the needy ‘ex’ of an old pal, mercurial Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington) asks him for help not only in landing a job but also in finding an apartment and packing up her belongings that are back in Washington, D.C. In short, the scantily clad femme fatale Nikki turns Richard’s life into constant turmoil, kind of like Kevin Spacey’s lust in “American Beauty.”
Chris Rock, who directed and co-scripted with fellow comedian Louise C.K., has a lot to say about disillusionment with the institution of marriage, relationships and dilemmas faced by the black upper-middle class in suburbia, subjects he often covers in his rapier-wit stand-up routines. But he doesn’t articulate it here with much finesse, relying too often on the voiceover technique utilized in his TV series “Everybody Hates Chris.”
Back on his 2004 HBO special “Never Scared,” Rock said: “Those are the choices in life: You can be married and bored or single and lonely. Ain’t no happiness nowhere.” And not much has changed. So on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “I Think I Love My Wife” is a raunchy, garbled 5, an improbable, uneven rumination about love on the rocks.
