"Did we build our happiness on the unhappiness of others?" Each able-bodied participant in the sexual roundelay of Ira Sachs's Married Life airs this moral uncertainty aloud at some point, and only Pierce Brosnan's smarmy Richard, via voiceover narration, provides a coherent follow-up: "Well, that's for you to judge." Of course, that you is the audience, for this is a film that directs all its energy outward, with a wink and a nod at us clued-in contemporary folk who hold ourselves above these sorry homewrecking fools in their period decor. Married Life is a hermetic, sardonic, downright chilly production, vaguely in debt to the surface sparkle of Douglas Sirk's postwar melodramas but lacking even an ounce of their compassion. Even Rainer Werner Fassbinder, by most accounts a tyrant and obsessive maniac, found a way to channel Sirk's humanism through a wall of alienation effects. But when the characters in Married Life cry out for help, the entire mise-en-scène stifles them with irony.