We Don't Live Here Anymore | Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern | brilliant treatment of stallled marriages

We Don't Live Here Anymore | Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern | Scenes from a modern marriage

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We Don't Live Here...

	We Don't Live Here Anymore Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern Warner Home Video, 2004 average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
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brilliant treatment of stallled marriages

This is one of the best films I have ever seen on what happens to many marriages: after a long time together, the partners pull away from eachother and wonder if they are still in love. Life is taken over by routine and the demands of work; frustration grows. The pain of this stage of life - when people begin to ask, "is this it?" - is vividly portrayed in this film. None of the characters are judged as they act out and seek some way to feel they are still alive, while having to take care of their kids and the banalities of house cleaning and their petty disagreements. Their dilemma is far more common than we would like to imagine.

This is very hard to watch, but its realism is quite extraordinary and shockingly intimate, with a depth vastly superior to the romantic fluff of hollywood. Even the way that the characters change in this moment of crisis is believable and all too human. Some can grow beyond it, some cannot. THere is wisdom in this truly great drama. And the acting in uniformly brilliant, approaching the complexity of real life.

Warmly recommended, but be prepared for a very rough ride.

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Scenes from a modern marriage

This low-key drama confronts infidelity and marital discontent through the private dramas of two couples. Both Hank (Peter Krause) and Jack (Mark Ruffalo) are teachers at a community college, Hank an aspiring novelist who treats infidelity as a necessary adjunct to his life. The most sophisticated of the four, he embraces the romance of the writer's ancillary angst, women serving as both inspiration and gratification. His wife, Edith (Naomi Watts) is aware of Hank's indiscretions, increasingly bitter and disappointed with her marriage, but unwilling to act.

Edith and Hank are good friends with Jack and Terry (Laura Dern), socializing frequently, a source of titillation for a clandestine affair between Jack and Edith. Edith embarks on the affair partly from spite and partly from devastating loneliness, but Jack is not as cavalier as his fellow adulterer, blindsided by daydreams of his lover and irritated by Terry's obvious flaws. As Jack, Ruffalo is sensitive and thoughtful, playing the formerly faithful husband with subtle grace, sinking into a moral quagmire that renders him unable to stop the affair or leave his wife. This man enjoys the comforts of marriage, children and the routine, almost undone by the risks he is taking to meet Edith.

The jewel of the movie is Laura Dern as Terry, her performance flawless as the confused, wounded wife who senses her husband's betrayal but won't confront him, crippled by her own inadequacies. Dern and Ruffalo move in perfect counterpoint, circling their marriage, challenged in ways they never anticipated. He obsesses over the other woman and adores his children, but there is more emotional depth here than may appear. This is a man who cannot abide his own betrayal. Edith realizes that eventually the affair will be exposed, almost anticipating the ensuing confrontation.

Under the direction of John Curran, the insightful script is riveting in the hands of these actors, the subdued atmosphere belying a tight undercurrent of tension, a sense that something terrible might happen to these people, especially Jack and Terry. The director manipulates this tension to pull the characters back and forth, their interactions emotionally charged, until finally the truth of each marriage is revealed. This movie has been compared to The Ice Storm, but I never made any such connection when watching the film. The Ice Storm is cynical, a study in carelessness, but this film carries the weight of truth, how easily marriage gets side-tracked by tedium, how simple it is to forget the cost of infidelity.

Krause plays an egocentric, insensitive cad, Watts the long-suffering wife driven to her own solutions, but Dern is the heart of the movie, waxing hot and cold, caught up in her own deceptions, bruised by Jack's betrayal, both of them torn between need and responsibility. The couple is faced with the consequences of their actions, where nothing happens in a vacuum and the children pay the price of their parent's self-indulgence. There are no easy answers, no great epiphany, only hard truths and the concessions demanded by modern marriage. Luan Gaines/2005.

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Bergman remixed for the millennium

A beautifully rendered, fascinating portrait of two competitive high-school teachers and their spouses whose marriages are simultaneously falling apart, for different reasons, reacting to the wreckage with varying degrees of academic detachment. Mark Ruffalo smolders in a nicely uncomfortable performance as Jack Linden, a terminally frustrated perfectionist who constantly finds fault with his wife, Terri, played with smudgy bursts of futile rage by Laura Dern. Peter Krause seems right at home playing the workaholic best friend, whose marriage to the beautiful Edith is marked not so much by apathy, as much as a vaguely menacing sense of self-loathing. The character studies are expertly dissected by screenwriter Larry Gross, but it's hard to give him too many props considering he's adapting Andre Dubus' dead-on material. Michael Convertino creates simple yet ominous soundscapes to great effect, especially in the "space" montage. Hugely underrated and misunderstood by many mainstream audiences, this is Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" remixed for the new millennium.

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You always hurt the one you love

Some of the exchanges between the coupled characters in "We Don't Live Here Anymore" remind me a little bit of the dialogue in Mike Nichol's "Closer": Brutal, scathing, honest, realistic and uncomfortable to watch. However, there' s a fundamental difference in the two films. The characters in "Closer" are nothing more than narcissists using romantic relationships to validate themselves, whereas the characters in this film are married couples with children who genuinely, on some level, love each other. It's just that all four of the main characters in this film have reached a point in their lives and their relationships where their once passionate romances have morphed into lukewarm, messy partnerships, and none of them are sure they want to stick around. As a result each of the characters starts looking to their best friend's spouse for the attention and passion they're not getting at home, and that's when things get really messy. Intelligent without being pretentious, as well as beautifully acted by some of my favorite actors, I found this to be a handsome, poignant little film.

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Lacking in Warmth

"We Don't Live Here Anymore" is a languidly told tale of human faults and frailties. Its resolution, however, is less than satisfactory.

The film involves four main characters. These characters are two married couples in their thirties whose marriages are disintegrating. There is sex between the partners outside of their marriages but within their group. Although in most cases this would create perhaps hostile outrage within the marriages, in this case, it is largely seen as inevitable and almost acceptable. Yet such arrangements, no matter what the circumstances, do involve playing with fire.

Although the acting in this film is near flawless, there is something missing. This missing piece may be that the characters are so lacking in warmth and none engage the viewer. Each player is bleak, lacking a moral code and, thus, fails to leave the viewer with any real empathy for their plights.

Although I found the film very easy to watch, its conclusion was without clarity and the characters were without warmth of any kind. Unfortunately, the film was something of a let down.

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