We Don't Live Here Anymore


by Shari L. Rosenblum

We Don't Live Here Anymore unfolds in the self-contradiction of real life -- in a quiet academic town, in a literary time suspended somewhere between the early seventies and today. Adapted from two novellas by Andre Dubus, whose Killings gave us the lugubriously self-impressed revenge fantasy In the Bedroom, it finds its footing in a far more murky moral quandary at the intersection of love and marriage. At once sobering and cautiously optimistic, it tackles adultery head on, stepping outside the clichés and examining as if at first blush the unions we commit to and the commitments that keep us together: two couples bound together by the loosened ties around their necks.

The film opens on a small evening party: four individuals dancing, swaying, laughing disconnectedly -- Jack (Mark Ruffalo), Terry (Laura Dern), Hank (Peter Krause) and Edith (Naomi Watts). We know they are paired, but the pairings are unclear. The mood is fraught with insalubrious anticipation; angst hangs heavy over all. There is a lightness to the illicit alternatives -- even with the weight of guilt upon them -- that defies easy judgment or condemnation.

Hank is a writer, teaching writing, while Jack teaches literature.  Each has a persona consistent with his character's profession: the inventor and the interpreter. One seeks to create impressions, the other to understand them. Terry and Edith are housewives, equally dissimilar: one disorganized, uncontrolled, emotionally unruly, the other neat, clean, emotions ordered and deliberate. What they are is as important to the story as who they are: each in some part a photographic negative of each of the other three.   

Directed by John Curran from a screenplay by Larry Gross -- more faithful to the novella's dialogue, in the end, than to its author's sentiment -- We Don't Live Here Anymore thrashes around in sustained claustrophobia. Whoever else lives in the town (and we get only the briefest indication that anyone else does), the film zooms in on these two couples occupying a single emotional space: stifled, suffocating, clawing and pawing at each other. It moves inevitably to the syncopated rhythm of gasping for breath. It propels itself forward gulping great gusts of air, and then exhales slowly, extendedly, as the players deflate and poise to start again. Though intertwinings marital and extra abound, lust is the least of motivations here. What is lacking in these marriages is not the sex, but the sense of connection -- not the rocking of the bodies, but the coming together of the minds. The film's ease with sexuality -- adult, mature -- takes the tension out of the bedroom, beyond the bedroom, and into the living places where the risk is more severe. 

It takes stabs at symbolism, too -- and these are less successful, more forced: traffic lights and railroad crossings, running, bridges, and a precipice now and again. There's something to be made of them, but it's better left alone. The film works best in its more naturalistic moments. The actorly moments. And the cast here is exceptional. Ruffalo, who played casually deliberate in In the Cut, sentimentally creepy in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and undercover cocky in Collateral, imbues Jack with an ambivalence, resentment, and need that bleed through the screen. Dern, in perhaps the most outstanding performance of the quartet, gives herself over to her character's doubts, frustrations, and pains in a performance so wrenching it bowls you over even when the character repulses you. Watts has a subtler task -- conveying desperation through measured calm -- and she rises to it sublimely. And if Krause's work is the most easily overlooked, it's because he is, more complexly than is first apparent, not only the catalyst, but the effective author of the melodrama we have laid out before us, completing the role for which he was designed.

For all the gashes and all the scars, all the exploration of the sacred union in its unexpurgated imperfection, We Don't Live Here Anymore is not an indictment of marriage. In the darkness of the theater, it thrives on faith that love exists.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene