Riding the wreck
Anyone who has been around couples headed for divorce can feel the emotions as if they were tiny but powerful tsunami.
It takes a sincere sense of loyalty, if not love, to stick around and lend support.
That’s what it’s like to sit through the 101 minutes of John Curran’s film “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Curran has adapted two short stories by the late Andre Dubus into a contemporary equivalent of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Best friends Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause) are professors at a community college. Jack is married to Terry (Laura Dern), Hank to Edith (Naomi Watts).
From the outside, everything looks perfect. Only thing is, Jack is having an affair with Edith, Hank is a frustrated writer who hits on any available student, and Terry quells her frustration and loneliness with daily glasses, if not full bottles, of wine.
These are not happy people, even though they seem to have everything – good jobs, nice houses, healthy children who do dance recitals (one hilariously called “The Angry Housewives”). While our focus is on Jack, attention doesn’t necessarily lead to attraction: Hank may be a cad, but Jack is a coward. And he lies, especially to himself.
Curran creates a good sense of place (though seemingly set in New England, the film was shot in Vancouver, B.C.), and he is a skillful framer of tension. What gives the film the energy that it has in surplus, though, is the acting.
Ruffalo – who got his break in another taut drama, 2000’s “You Can Count On Me” – has never been better as a conflicted, constipated mass of insecurities. Watts, an Oscar nominee for 2003’s “21 Grams,” ably portrays an Edith so hungry for intimacy that she gets ever reckless working out her needs. Krause, of HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” is perfect as a man so self-absorbed that he can’t even begin to comprehend what Edith wants.
It is Dern, though, upon whom the film revolves. So ravenous for affection that she’s willing even to put up with Jack’s man-child refusal to face anything, especially the truth, Dern fills the screen with emotion more raw than sushi and as hard to digest. Accept her performance, and you’ll likely see “We Don’t Live Here” as one big catharsis from your own personal struggles.
But if you can’t, then the solution is simple: Don’t go near the tsunami.