Full Summary (Warning: Spoilers)
We start at a fashion show where we meet the family we'll be following for 88 minutes of this film. Peter(Liam Neeson) a software engineer, Lisa (Laura Linney) a shoe designer, and Abigail (Romola Garai) the daughter. After the show Abigail wanders off with her boyfriend George (Craig Parkinson) while Peter and Lisa head off to dinner. The conversation at the table this husband and wife of 25 years have,will set in motion the events to come. Lisa brings up the open ended and hypothetical question to her husband on what would be his thoughts and comments, if one of them had slept with someone else.
That night in bed and the next morning, she keeps hinting at him that she has something she needs to say, but, just walks out the door like a normal day. We won't see her again, now we are taken along as Peter starts clearing out all his wife's belongings, including her cell phone. Seeing a voicemail on her phone he can't help listen to it and finds another man leaving a love message for his wife. Now, curiosity has the better of him and has started digging through her laptop files, stumbling upon a passworded file labeled Love. Hitting the roadblock with the password he can't decipher and moving onto the email folder where a message is discovered from a Ralph confessing his love for Lisa and about them being together. Peter is now dead set on finding and confronting this man she's had an affair with.
Great thing about working at a software company, he has a security person that can trace the email address to it's IP address. While he waits for the address, an endless night of typing in passwords finally meets success as the folder is now unlocked. What's found will take the rage boiling inside to a new level, risque pictures of Lisa and Ralph at a lake in Spain. Only one thing to do now and that's for him to hop to the next flight to the address of the emailer...Milan, Italy. Milan a place Lisa is no stranger to due to her work in the fashion world. We now get to watch as Peter, having found Ralph, plays a daily game of chess at a local cafe with him, learning about the history of the two of them and how Ralph and Lisa met 12 years ago. Abigail has also come to Italy in search of her dad who has also gone missing and left clues to where he has wandered off to, she won't stay long seeing how much rage and hate her dad is carrying for this man. Eventually Peter needs to confront Ralph and does so by setting up a meeting in a hotel Ralph and his wife used to frequent.
When Ralph gets to the hotel it's not Lisa waiting for him, but, Peter and he has now realized who this man he has been playing chess with actually is. We also are made aware how this whole time Lisa has actually been dead, having died of cancer, explaining why he cleared out her belongings and we never saw her again. The two then exchange their views on Lisa and won't talk to each other again till the end of the movie when they meet at a party in London, thrown by Ralph in Lisa's honor, which will mark the closure that Peter needs.
My thoughts:
If this movie sounds dull, your wrong, it's a snooze fest. A very slow moving drama that goes nowhere really fast. With characters you really never get to know and could careless as to what happens to them in the end. Much of the dialogue is so uninteresting it will just help to loosen your eyes from the screen and attempting a plot twist that doesn't work, just to bring up more questions and head scratching. It's a movie about the length one man will go to find out the truth he already knows. At the end of the movie you'll just be left wondering why you sat through this drab movie and what was the director (Richard Eyre) trying to achieve.
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