We Don't Live Here Anymore

As The Persuaders sang in1971 "‘it’s a thin line between love and hate” and that pretty much is the premise of John Curran’s film about two marriages in crisis. Jack Linden (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank Evans (Peter Krause) are professors on a small university campus in Oregon; Jack is married to Terry (Laura Dern) and Hank to Edith (Naomi Watts). Jack is having an affair with Edith, Hank is serially unfaithful and adds Terry to his list of conquests. Terry suspects Jack but not Edith. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "So it goes".

Written by Larry Gross and based on two stories by Andre Dubus, We Don't Live Here Anymore is an intense  portrait of the boredom of marriage with its inevitable loss of sexual attraction and the consequent lure, but inevitable misery, of infidelity, None of the four characters are happy and only Terry is trying to do anything to turn the situation around even if her drinking is defeating her efforts.

The dialogic exchanges are such that one feels they are drawn from real life experience although the fact that Curran gives us little respite from the angst (even Jack's bike ride with his kids, one of the few moments in the film in which any attention is given to the children, is intercut with flashbacks to his coupling with Edith in the bushes nearby) and this partiality weakens the film as a portrait of the marital state and relationships which were, needless to say, once very different.

Audiences who enjoy relationship dramas, particularly fraught ones, will revel in Curran’s film. The cast invest themselves fully in their character’s pain with both Watts and Dern, established masters of emotional self- flagellation,convincing, the one all diconnected internalisation, the other bursting into shrewish pleading and Ruffalo and Krause both strong in their less showy roles as we follow the quartet's story to the inevitable breakdown in their collective deceptions.  

FYI: For more successful treatment of similar material see Ang Lee's The Ice Storm,1997  

 

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