Release Date: August 13, 2004
Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Peter Krause
Directed by: John Curran
Written by: Larry Gross
Distributed by: Warner Independent Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (sexual content, language)
We Don’t Live Here Anymore, a well-intentioned, well-acted, and half-satisfying drama directed by John Curran, is about marital infidelities. It also belongs to a broader class of movies that seek to amplify the problems of ordinary people, as if by putting them under a magnifying glass and blowing them up to widescreen proportions, they might reveal something about the fundamentals of human disagreements. Entries in this genre have ranged from classics like Ordinary People to more recent and (therefore?) less notable films like Unfaithful and The Door in the Floor, but none of these have been successful in their searches for the darker secrets of life.
Likewise, there is little, in the philosophical sense, to be gained from an otherwise intelligent and studious movie like We Don’t Live Here Anymore. If you’re looking for an answer to the question of why husbands will cheat on their wives, or vice versa, you won’t find it here, because, as these movies seem to know but stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, the circumstances of every infidelity are different, linked to each other by only the infidelities themselves. Love (or lack of it), abuses, indiscretions, fights, shouting matches, disagreements, and disputes are all terribly superficial -- the standard grab-bag of reasons people reach into to explain away otherwise inexplicable cases of immorality.
You will, however, find a few things in the cinematic sense to be gained from Anymore, including four wonderfully well-rounded performances that gloss over the screenplay’s inability to juggle the same number of characters. Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern play Jack and Terry Linden, a married couple, who are friends with Hank and Edith Evans, another married couple played by Peter Krause and Naomi Watts. Jack is discontent with his marriage to Terry, and Hank has no affection for Edith -- so Jack and Edith have naturally fallen into an affair, and one which both of the jilted spouses may suspect and even know about. But while Terry is understandably upset (though she is possibly more enraged by Jack’s attempts to place her pointed questions about his frequent meetings with Edith in a paranoid light), Hank is strangely sublime.
Anymore, which was written by Larry Gross and based on two Andre Dubus short stories, “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Adultery,” fails in its attempt to dissect adultery and infidelities because it thinks of their nature as a matter of course -- inevitable, almost. The story seems to say that it is expected that discontented Jack and unloved Edith would end up in an affair, or that it is inevitable that they will get caught, eventually, or that the repercussions of their actions will be exponentially more disastrous than the actions themselves. Adultery is no more interesting to this movie than a trip to the supermarket.
And yet the director, John Curran, is fascinated with the cinematic possibilities. He a master of the two-second flashback, the kind of quick edit that, if done as it is here, is a great tool in suggesting a tortured character’s thoughts (he uses it most often with Jack, who can’t help associating the forest near his home, for example, with one of his secret rendezvous with Edith).
Curran has also turned the story into a wonderfully interwoven, noirish piece that often finds scene after scene overlaid with the soundtrack from a different scene altogether, emphasizing the characters’ connected and interdependent miseries. Hank, a distracted writer and junior college English teacher, has pushed Edith away. Edith has turned to Jack, also an English professor, under self-inflicted pressure to live up to Hank, who has eyes for Terry. Terry, simultaneously offended and flattered by Hank’s attention, is desperate to regain Jack but toying with the idea of letting him go. Each segment comes from a previous one, and causes another, so that by the time the audience meets up with Jack, Hank, Edith, and Terry, the loop has become infinite.
It is interesting to watch, at first, because it is very well acted. Watts shines, as always, as the bold and flirtatious Edith, eager to road-test her sexuality after a suffocating lack of attention from Hank. Krause, opposite her, is curiously carefree, and his Hank is nearly oblivious to Edith. Ruffalo does another of his passive-aggressive, wounded-dog men, the kind you can imagine grew up out of a very petulant child. And Dern is startlingly and unsettlingly effective as the abandoned Terry. But after a while it starts to become grating and frustrating, watching these characters struggle, for no apparent reason, in the face of interminable relationships.
You might say that when the movie ends, the characters have found a way to break out of this loop (or have, in the movie’s spirit, stumbled inexorably through the motions of an adulterous endgame), but I found myself substantially unsatisfied. Perhaps as a consequence of the movie’s regard for the nature of adultery as an inevitable series of unfortunate events, We Don’t Live Here Anymore seems to think of adultery itself as incidental or beneath speculation -- a nasty speed bump on the road to someplace better. I had expected more out of the film than a simple stage for some effective performances, but now I can see that it, too, was a speed bump, on the way to some better movies.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)