We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004)
What do you do when your marriage after ten or fifteen years isn't perfect, and maybe you, or your spouse, is thinking about having an affair? Wow, is this about as universal a theme as any? And set it in a very very nice but very normal semi-suburban contemporary American world (the fringes of an unnamed Washington State city), have two couples who are close friends all begin to doubt and melt down together. It's really a great starting point because it matters.
The danger of such a story is that it won't seem original, or insightful, or right enough. Director John Curran is working with a pair of short stories by well known fiction writer Andre Dubus, and he seems to make something special happen out of nothing much. This interplay of four relatively normal people, each distinctive but all four belonging to a cross section of educated, white, upper middle-class America, is almost all of the movie. Their three children play a small but important role anchoring their emotional outbursts, keeping a brake on the breakdowns in a way that is all to familiar.
All four of the main actors are cast perfectly. Mark Ruffalo (also an executive producer of the movie) and Laura Dern make one couple, Naomi Watts (a producer) and Peter Krause (still filming episodes as Nate in "Six Feet Under") form the other. They live in similar wood frame houses a short drive from each other. The two men are both English professors and they go running together. The two women don't seem to work at all, but each is raising one or two children, still young. It was once bliss, and should be still, but whatever it is that makes things go wrong in marriage has started to go wrong.
It's a convenience of plot, almost the kind of strategy a playwright would use, that the mixed emotions of these four begin to cross among themselves. No one's world is that tightly limited, but it's okay for the movie because the point isn't about the situation being possible, as a whole, but about the individual reactions each has. The movie is slightly deliberate but never slow, as long as you remain curious about their motivations, their fears of getting caught (or wanting to get caught, or expecting to get caught). And their efforts to patch things up, to come to some higher love about it, not just for the "sake of the children" but for themselves.
In some ways it's a perfect movie, except that it misses a kind of epiphany that this kind of effort really needs by the end. It does try, and the last few minutes of the movie are unexpected but quite reasonable. Everyone can quibble about whether he would do this or she would do that, based on how the characters are set up, and I certainly would--for example, the final action by Naomi Watts struck me as a great move by the writer, adding another level of depth to it all, but it wasn't quite supported enough by what happened earlier. I can't say more, but it's an example of both how the whole movie, first scene to last, ties together, and how it all could have been nuanced and emphasized in tiny little ways to give it even more credibility and incredibility (the first for conviction, the second for drama).
Watts is probably the weakest link of the four, and Krause, as terrific as he is here, is given a personality of detachment and minor depression, so he is often almost invisible. Ruffalo matches Krause's calm, but he has an uncanny ability to make that permeate the screen. His face and movements seem to do nothing, literally, and yet he has a tone of voice, and just a bare change of expression, to be really effective. Dern is the most dynamic of the four, and she goes from one intensity to another, from quiet to vitriolic, in a commanding performance. I'd call this an ensemble cast (and it is, I know) but in fact most of the film shows only two actors at a time, in different combinations.
It's an odd but perfect comparison to another film, released three weeks later in 2004, that deals with almost the same themes, "Closer," directed by Mike Nichols. I think "Closer" is astonishing, another set of four great actors in a mixed up set of emotions, but next to Curran's film, Nichols makes an extraverted, over the top, big personality experience out of it. It's a great ride, whatever the interactions of the two couples. In "We Don't Live Here Anymore" there is every effort to keep it small, local, regular, everyday. If that's it's strength, somehow, it's its limitation, too, because it demands a very high level of subtlety. Dramatics has to be replaced with perception, and with perfect writing.
And it comes close, at times very close. Curran is no Mike Nichols, frankly (no one is), but he has pulled off (with the help of four great actors in good form) an excellent film. It will be too run of the mill for many viewers, but if you like soap opera drama raised to the level of a two hour, thoughtful movie, you'll really like it.
What do you do when your marriage after ten or fifteen years isn't perfect, and maybe you, or your spouse, is thinking about having an affair? Wow, is this about as universal a theme as any? And set it in a very very nice but very normal semi-suburban contemporary American world (the fringes of an unnamed Washington State city), have two couples who are close friends all begin to doubt and melt down together. It's really a great starting point because it matters.
The danger of such a story is that it won't seem original, or insightful, or right enough. Director John Curran is working with a pair of short stories by well known fiction writer Andre Dubus, and he seems to make something special happen out of nothing much. This interplay of four relatively normal people, each distinctive but all four belonging to a cross section of educated, white, upper middle-class America, is almost all of the movie. Their three children play a small but important role anchoring their emotional outbursts, keeping a brake on the breakdowns in a way that is all to familiar.
All four of the main actors are cast perfectly. Mark Ruffalo (also an executive producer of the movie) and Laura Dern make one couple, Naomi Watts (a producer) and Peter Krause (still filming episodes as Nate in "Six Feet Under") form the other. They live in similar wood frame houses a short drive from each other. The two men are both English professors and they go running together. The two women don't seem to work at all, but each is raising one or two children, still young. It was once bliss, and should be still, but whatever it is that makes things go wrong in marriage has started to go wrong.
It's a convenience of plot, almost the kind of strategy a playwright would use, that the mixed emotions of these four begin to cross among themselves. No one's world is that tightly limited, but it's okay for the movie because the point isn't about the situation being possible, as a whole, but about the individual reactions each has. The movie is slightly deliberate but never slow, as long as you remain curious about their motivations, their fears of getting caught (or wanting to get caught, or expecting to get caught). And their efforts to patch things up, to come to some higher love about it, not just for the "sake of the children" but for themselves.
In some ways it's a perfect movie, except that it misses a kind of epiphany that this kind of effort really needs by the end. It does try, and the last few minutes of the movie are unexpected but quite reasonable. Everyone can quibble about whether he would do this or she would do that, based on how the characters are set up, and I certainly would--for example, the final action by Naomi Watts struck me as a great move by the writer, adding another level of depth to it all, but it wasn't quite supported enough by what happened earlier. I can't say more, but it's an example of both how the whole movie, first scene to last, ties together, and how it all could have been nuanced and emphasized in tiny little ways to give it even more credibility and incredibility (the first for conviction, the second for drama).
Watts is probably the weakest link of the four, and Krause, as terrific as he is here, is given a personality of detachment and minor depression, so he is often almost invisible. Ruffalo matches Krause's calm, but he has an uncanny ability to make that permeate the screen. His face and movements seem to do nothing, literally, and yet he has a tone of voice, and just a bare change of expression, to be really effective. Dern is the most dynamic of the four, and she goes from one intensity to another, from quiet to vitriolic, in a commanding performance. I'd call this an ensemble cast (and it is, I know) but in fact most of the film shows only two actors at a time, in different combinations.
It's an odd but perfect comparison to another film, released three weeks later in 2004, that deals with almost the same themes, "Closer," directed by Mike Nichols. I think "Closer" is astonishing, another set of four great actors in a mixed up set of emotions, but next to Curran's film, Nichols makes an extraverted, over the top, big personality experience out of it. It's a great ride, whatever the interactions of the two couples. In "We Don't Live Here Anymore" there is every effort to keep it small, local, regular, everyday. If that's it's strength, somehow, it's its limitation, too, because it demands a very high level of subtlety. Dramatics has to be replaced with perception, and with perfect writing.
And it comes close, at times very close. Curran is no Mike Nichols, frankly (no one is), but he has pulled off (with the help of four great actors in good form) an excellent film. It will be too run of the mill for many viewers, but if you like soap opera drama raised to the level of a two hour, thoughtful movie, you'll really like it.