Customer Reviews

We Don't Live Here Anymore

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

Andre Dubus's novella on which this film is based can be read and interpreted a couple of ways: as an "The Ice Storm" like evisceration of 2 lonely, masochistic couples or as an "The Ice Storm" evisceration of 2 lonely masochistic couples whom Dubus shows not only understanding for but also shows that they can be saved, they can be redeemed, there is enough humanity within them to care about.
This film of "We Don't Live here Anymore" tells the story of Jack Linden (Mark Ruffalo, who just gets better and better), who is married to Terry (Laura Dern) and Hank Evans (Peter Krause) who is married to Edith (the luminous Naomi Watts).
All four have lost their way and are having affairs with the other's spouse: they have forgotten how to love and sex is now all they have to experience any kind of feeling. Their pairings are mechanical, if there is any so-called Love, it is fleeting and only of the moment. These are people who have experienced Love and found it to be lacking. They talk a lot, they fight and argue more: but all of it means nothing and seems to only be a means to pass the day without slitting their throats.
Where director Curran gets it right though is how he shows that nothing, none of the arguments leads to any kind of easy resolutions: in fact there is no resolution to any of this at all. Curran presents, I think a very contemporary and ambiguous view of his characters and of life really: it's messy, we sometimes are with the wrong people, Love mostly doesn't last but no matter what, we have options, we have hope.

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.

I don't think I've ever just sat and watched a movie and `got' it quite like this. Maybe it's because every married couple goes through the feelings expressed in this film. Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts & Peter Krause star as two couples whose relationships are rattled by adultery. These two couples have very different relationships yet are looking for exactly the same thing.

Jack (Ruffalo) is a college professor married to Terry (Dern). Terry loves Jack but Jack is falling in love with Edith (Watts) who is married to Hank (Krause) who doesn't love her but is attracted to Terry. Jack and Edith fall into an affair that causes more pain to each of them then to their respective partners. Watching Jack and Edith react to their mates after they've just been with each other, the tears, the looks, the concern in their eyes. Hank in the meantime is looking for someone to cure his boredom with his wife, and Terry may be that woman, and since Jack's guilt is tearing him apart he encourages Terry and Hank's relationship in order to justify is infidelity.

What Jack never banked on was realizing the love he had for his wife and his children. After his wife sleeps with Hank, Jack is panged with regret and heartache as he watches his marriage fall apart, the marriage he felt he was tired of but in actuality it's the only thing he wants and needs.

This movie is a wake up call for all of us who are falling out of love with our relationships, our lives in general and the ones we share it with. It's brilliantly scripted and acted and flows wonderfully, delivering its point beautifully. Watts and Dern are brilliant here and show so much feeling in all their words, in all their actions. Honestly one of the best movie's I've ever seen and one that will stay with me for all time.

We Don't Live Here Anymore can take its place on the shelf with just about every other average infidelity film. Which is kind of a bummer, because not only are all four of the leads good-looking and talented, but they're the kind of pro's who could turn just about any old script into something worth watching. Not here.

The main problems with the film are obvious within its first five minutes: we see marrieds Jack and Terry (Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern) and Hank and Edith (Peter Krause, Naomi Watts) slightly drunk, kickin' it back to some music, while Jack stares in slow-mo like a hungry wolf at Edith. Edith volunteers to run to the store with Jack when they run out of beer, and Alexandre de Franceschi's editing goes to work. And boy does Franseschi like to edit. And edit. And edit. It's kinda sleek, and maybe something to be admired, but when the next 45 minutes of the film are cut together in a mish-mash of fragmented moments, it gets annoying. So there you have it; the dilemma: a great cast with juicy, wife-swapping fodder for a movie, but the damn thing's over-edited and just stays on the same emotional level the whole time.

And that doesn't make sense, considering it's such rocky territory. Jack and Edith are having, and have been having, a steamy little affair, and though Hank may have an idea, Terry still has yet to catch on. Hank is notorious for infidelity, with one in his past that nearly killed his marriage to Edith; you get the idea that killing the marriage wouldn't be so bad. Jack wants to, since he loves Edith, but the emotionally high-strung Terry is a strong force in his life that he can't just toss off like that. Considering there's more to the plot than that, this adaptation of two Andre Dubus short stories sounds tight and layered on the outside, but paraded across the screen, it has a quality of sameness that fails to elevate it to the full-blooded psychodrama that Dubus' In the Bedroom was.

Of course, at times, I derived a kind of pleasure watching the cast members work, as much as they're surrounded by inadequacies in the script, editing, and pacing of the film. Mark Ruffalo has reached the point that Julianne Moore did in 1997 with Boogie Nights: he proves that he can sink his teeth into any kind of role and make it look effortless and stunning. He takes Jack, a schlubby English professor with ambivalent tendencies toward his wife and the hots for his best friend's wife, and somehow creates a believable persona. Peter Krause, finally getting some big-screen time, has a boyish glee as he navigates the immoral world of Hank. Dern and Watts, though, are both tarnished by Larry Gross' uneven screenplay. The women of We Don't Live are submissive housewives who are either neurotic (Dern's Terry) or just plain awkwardly written (Watts' Edith).

I don't get how this movie, with so much potential, just seems to languish without any rise and fall. Maybe it's the fact that it's hard to truly care anything about a foursome who f**k around with their respective friends' spouses, when they're given few redeeming qualities and then further surrounded by kids who seem more reasonable than they are (a scene toward the end of the film shows Jack's kids discussing theology; maybe they should counsel their mommy and daddy). Then again, I think it all comes down to that initial scene. Anymore begins with a quick-paced opener that cracks wide its characters, but then fails to really explore them in any way besides explaining who loves whom, etc.

For all my misgivings about We Don't Live Here Anymore, I can't say that I was ever really, truly bored. There's something about watching good actors work that makes that impossible. And thank God, the film does seem to explore longer takes and deeper conversations by the end, and it does have some kind of a fitting finale. It's a strange film, though, not necessarily in its plot (mundane and obvious) or its execution (too technically heavy-handed, too emotional vague), but in the general effect of it. For nearly two hours, I sat and watched two marriages getting torn apart...but I can't say it had much of an effect. I hate to talk about a movie like a drug, but the analogy works; I've been high on a lot of great films this summer, but this one didn't even give a buzz. See this one if you like the cast, but don't expect what they've delivered in the past. C+

My husband I watched this move with rapt attention. We have both been divorced and for both of us, this movie brought back many memories of painful times which we went through with our prior spouses. I have come to understand that in human relationships there are many obstacles and many lessons to be learned; I have experienced the spiritual truth that when everything seems the darkest, the light may be about to dawn; therefore, be aware that what seems the most hopeless, could turn around when you think eveyrhing is lost. That is what I saw happen in the lives of these two couples. Both of the women felt unloved; both of the women knew their husbands' weren't faithful to them. One choose to be silent about it, and just have an affair of her own with her best friend's husband. And the other woman tried to get through to her husband again and again, but got nowhere. Out of frustration, she even having a couple encounters with the other husband, and this didn't affect her husband who seemed simply inhuman in his indifference to his wife. It was only when the affairs came out in the open, when the one husband told his wife he was in love with the other woman, well, only then did he begin to feel anything, as far I could see, anything really deeply human other than just his sexual excitement in being with someone else. The other husband also seemed terribly shallow but when confronted with losing his wife and child in divorce, then he finally agreed to quit cheating on her.

The other man also went to his wife to whom he had been so indifferent, and told her he didn't want to leave, and it wasn't about the children. He was then too sad to continue his affair, and just went back home, hopefully to rebuild his marriage. The miracles to me were the changes that took place with the husband;s, the willingness to start again on a much different more solid basis now. Edith's character appears to have given up because she stoopped down to the same level as her husband. To me she was saying to her husband, I don't like who I became by being married to you. Here, I believe she passed on the miracle. That philandering husband was willing to change now and that was what she needed him to do in order to remain with him, yet she choose to leave. I think this movie is profound, moving and thought-provoking. I loved it, but I do like character studies, I like movies that make you think, that are unusual, that show you how not to behave and that surprise you. I think everyone's acting was great; you really have little respect for anyone other than Laura Dern's character who comes across as the strongest most decent person in the film. She was even going to be a great woman to divorce, just like she was a great albeit imperfect wife to this man. He just couldn't see it until he had to face leaving the marriage because of his own foolish dysfunctional behavior. Love is work and the couple that stayed together, they were going to be one's to reap the benefits of sticking together even when things were at their lowest point. Don't quit before the miracle! This movie illustrate that very important spiritual truth of life and relationships.

This movie appealed to me because it was real. What I mean by that is it didn't resort to overdramatic tactics. The quadrangle worked, partly due to the fantastic cast, and the script. I felt like this is something that happens a lot in families. The end result of the film worked as well, and had me pleased that I saw this film. I recommend this movie to those who are in the mood for a mature film about relationships, and how families keep couples trapped and locked in marriages for the sake of the children.

If one were to make a list of films with a dreary perspective on marriages, this would nudge Ice Storm to second place. There's a thick tangle of lingering glances and inexorable silences as we draw our lens on two couples in the tweezer grip of adultery.

Can one can really call it wife-swapping if the characters aren't entirely conscious of what they're doing? Either way, there's no shortage here of hidden resentments and secret confusions driving our protagonists into each other's beds. Most intriguing part of the film is the mysterious ways in which their guilt manifests itself.

The acting lineup is fantastic all round. Naomi Watts is luminous and dreamy, while the male leads inject their characters with just enough soul to save them from being completely loathsome. Peter Krauss from Six Feet Under in particular is on my watch list, his effortlessness in potraying characters with rumpled personalities is disarming.

Some viewers may find the proceedings slow paced, which is true in patches. But it all adds up to a tender, angry, yet passionate narrative, and I found it riveting. Things could easily have become vulgar given the context but the film has a soulful core as driven home by the sobering closing line.

Recommended for the discerning eye but restless viewers expecting a novel take on matrimony would do well to skip it.

WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE is a tough movie based on two searingly poignant short stories by Andre Dubus ('In the Bedroom', 'House of Sand and Fog', 'Meditations from a Moveable Chair, 'Adultery and Other Choices', 'Broken Vessels') adapted with great care for the screen by Larry Goss. Dubus knows how to surgically open individual lives to expose the beating heart beneath, a heart that may be so abused and tattered that the mere fact that it is still able to support its body is shockingly formidable.

Under John Curran's direction this four-character story with added children is one of the more potent examinations of marriage in the 21st century. The two couples involved are middle class, suburbanites, friends bonded by college ties and by the fact that the two men are professors in the same school. Hank (Mark Ruffalo) is married to Terry (Laura Dern) but is having an affair with Edith (Naomi Watts) who is married to Hank (Peter Krause). The four appear so closely knit as friends that it makes their infidelities seem like incest. Both couples have children who are all too aware of the discord under their roofs, especially when the two couples are not sharing time together as is their mode of existence.

Neither couple is happily married: all four people see the need to stay together with their respective spouses because of their children, but each craves intimacy of the carnal and passionate kind that has disappeared from their married unions. No one is to blame in this quartet as each member is participating in adultery with their opposite couple. The manner in which these needs and acts occur, persist, and scar each of them is the driver of this remarkable film.

Ruffalo, Dern, Watts and Krause are all extraordinary in their work here. This kind of ensemble commitment is usually reserved or observed in the sanctity of a concert hall when listening to a gifted string quartet perform the works of Bartok or Shostakovich. Yet for all the magnificence of their achievements under John Curran's taut direction, some of the most memorable moments are reserved for the writing and delivery of the lines of the children of these dysfunctional couples: the sensitivity of the children's observation of the progress of the games is terrifying.

This is a tough movie about a tough subject: it needs to be seen. Grady Harp, December 2004

Andre Dubus's novella on which this film is based can be read and interpreted a couple of ways: as an "The Ice Storm" like evisceration of 2 lonely, masochistic couples or as an "The Ice Storm" evisceration of 2 lonely masochistic couples whom Dubus shows not only understanding for but also shows that they can be saved, they can be redeemed, there is enough humanity within them to care about. Director John Curran has chosen to fashion this film in the second way: from a humanistic point of view.
"We Don't Live here Anymore" tells the story of Jack Linden (Mark Ruffalo), who is married to Terry (Laura Dern) and Hank Evans (Peter Krause) who is married to Edith (the luminous Naomi Watts).
All four have lost their way and are having affairs with the other's spouse: they have forgotten how to love and sex is now all they have to experience any kind of feeling. Their pairings are mechanical, if there is any so-called Love, it is fleeting and only of the moment. These are people who have experienced Love and found it to be lacking. They talk a lot, they fight and argue more: but all of it means nothing and seems to only be a means to pass the day without slitting their throats.
All the performances feel right and the actors are comfortable in their character's shoes particularly Mark Ruffalo, who after his brave performance in the much neglected and maligned "In the Cut," seems to be getter better and better with each film.
Where director Curran gets it right though is how he shows that nothing, none of the arguments leads to any kind of easy resolution: in fact there is no resolution to any of this at all. Curran presents, I think a very contemporary and ambiguous view of his characters and of life really: it's messy, we sometimes are with the wrong people, Love mostly doesn't last but no matter what, we have options, we must always have hope.