Based on a short story by Andre Dubus - the same writer who inspired the Oscar-nominated 2001 film In The Bedroom - We Don't Live Here Anymore is a grown-up look at the breakdown of two marriages and the damaging effect that adultery can have. But whereas In The Bedroom was an incisive and searing comment on marital difficulties, this new offering is a dated and over-the-top affair, which largely relies on histrionics from both the cast and the script.
The Lindens (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern) and The Evans (Naomi Watts and Peter Krause) are two couples who spend a lot of time in each other's company. Both of the men work as English professors and attempt to write their own Great American novels. The women spend their days at home, with Terry (Dern) negating her housework for the bottle and Edith (Watts) looking after her perfect household.
Spending so much time together - at work, at dinner parties, on drinking binges - leads to the inevitable. An affair starts up, secrets are kept and boundaries are crossed. Equally inevitably, the truth is discovered and damaging consequences ensue.
So far, so John Updike. One of the problems with the film is that its subject matter is now dated - while in the past writers like Updike and Albee broke new ground in their examinations of marital infidelities in intellectual circles (why do they always have to be professors?), this has now become the staple diet of drama and soap opera.
The actors give it their best shot but end up reverting to type: Ruffalo broods, Dern is histrionic, Krause gives the solid guy performance familiar from his work on tv's Six Feet Under, while Watts radiates as the object of attraction. They all clearly work well together, but the material they are given - at times heavy-handed and very male - allows them to play little more than types.
John Curran directs with too much reverence for his source material and had produced a maudlin work, full of anguish and with little sense of humour. With enough angst going on in the world around us and in our own personal lives, We Don't Live Here Anymore is hardly the ideal escapist night out at the cinema, and suffers under the weight of its own pretension.
Paul Hurley
