We Don't Live Here Anymore

On paper, We Don't Live Here Anymore looks like a great movie. It features four actors with great resumes: Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, and Laura Dern. It's based on two novellas by Andre Dubus, the man behind the story that inspired the heartbreaking film In the Bedroom. I think some of the promise of the film is lost in execution.

Dubus wrote the novels in the 70s, which I didn't know going into the movie and helps explain some of the stuff that seemed really odd, including the fact that the two women are housewives and exert no intellectual or vocational independence--they accept their lot in life with no real fight. The movie centers around two couples, one played by Ruffalo/Dern, and the other by Krause/Watts, and both men are local college professors.

The movie centers around an affair that the Ruffalo/Watts characters are having, yet I found it hard to believe because we see none of the beginning of the relationship. One wonders, how did it get to that point? Furthermore, one suspects that the film is trying to make a point about Love, but as far as I can tell, the characters are primarily thinking about Sex. The resulting movie is a divisive movie that is garnering some of the most mixed reviews I've ever seen.