One stupendous performance and a generally thoughtful approach raise the somber “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” into the realm of interesting chamber drama.
This movie has an obsessive focus on the subject of adultery. In the opening sequence – perhaps the best scene in the movie – we sense infidelity flickering between two married couples at a dinner party. The dance of exchanged glances culminates in two of them kissing in a car during a beer run.
This affair is between Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Edith (Naomi Watts). He’s married to Terry (Laura Dern), and Edith is married to Hank (Peter Krause), who also is to be Jack’s best friend. This will get worse before it gets better.
The film uses the minutiae of domestic life to draw its differences and parallels between the couples. Jack and Terry live in a home in disarray; she drinks a bit and can’t keep their two kids from getting underfoot. Hank and Edith, on the other hand, live in a nicer, cleaner house, and their daughter has a grown-up propriety about her.
Jack and Hank are professors at a small college in a leafy out-of-the-way town, and there’s almost something academic about the way they approach infidelity. Hank seems to guess that his wife and best friend are trysting, but he hardly minds. His own affairs are apparently legion.
Meanwhile, although Jack is nervous about being discovered, he all but pushes Terry into the arms of the ever-available Hank.
Screenwriter Larry Gross adapted “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” from two short stories by Andre Dubus. The film keeps its focus locked on the two marriages, trying to see them from every angle – which means no one character is especially admirable. Everybody’s at fault.
While there isn’t much pleasure to be had in watching this unravel, the actors compel. Naomi Watts takes a dry, brittle tone that suits her character, while Peter Krause (of TV’s “Six Feet Under”) is distant and enigmatic.
Mark Ruffalo has been giving thoughtful performances since his breakthrough role in “You Can Count on Me,” but he adds a harder edge here. He can sometimes slide into the puppydog thing, but not in this role.
The most searing performance is given by Laura Dern, who’s been too absent from the big screen lately. Tall and wiry, with her face becoming more hawklike as she ages, Dern fairly blisters the wallpaper in her taunting late-night confession of adultery with her husband. If anybody sees the movie, it’s an Oscar-level performance.
Director John Curran has kept the movie so honest about its difficult characters that it’s tough to imagine the film attracting much of a following. As an acting showcase, however, this is strong medicine.
Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts and Laura Dern star in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.”
“We Don’t Live Here Anymore” HHH
Adultery lesson: A quartet of good performances (and, in Laura Dern’s case, a great one) raise this somber look at adultery into an interesting, if difficult, chamber drama. Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause play academics interested in each other’s wives. With Naomi Watts.
Rated: R rating is for language, subject matter.
Now showing: Seven Gables, Uptown.
“We Don’t Live Here Anymore” HHH
Adultery lesson: A quartet of good performances (and, in Laura Dern’s case, a great one) raise this somber look at adultery into an interesting, if difficult, chamber drama. Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause play academics interested in each other’s wives. With Naomi Watts.
Rated: R rating is for language, subject matter.
Now showing: Seven Gables, Uptown.
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