Movie: We Don't Live Here Anymore

I was over at 2Blowhards yesterday and read Michael Blowhard's derisive musings on the movie "Stranger than Fiction", here. I resisted his dismissal of the movie as pretentious drivel. I'd enjoyed the movie, on its own terms, and immediately I thought of a movie I'd just watched, that I imagined Michael Blowhard resenting in a similar way for its existential musings and lack of action and zip.

"We Don't Live Here Anymore" features Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, and Naomi Watts in a painful exploration of adultery.

A week or so in WR 123/ENG 257, Margaret and I showed out students the movie "After Innocence", which I'll write about soon. It features several men who were incarcerated for crimes they never committed, only to be released after many years in prison thanks to DNA evidence.

The movie featured a police officer in Providence, RI who was accused of murder. What linked him to the victim? Adultery. He'd had an affair with the victim. He was innocent of the crime, but the prosecutors had established a strong motivation because of their liaisons.

I told my students that there are very pragmatic reasons not to commit adultery. I thought the police officer's story substantiated my comment. Adultery never works out well, never creates trust or harmony, and can even make a person almost automatically a crime suspect if something goes afoul. I din't care to speak moralistically with my students. I was being a pragmatist.

No murders occur in "We Don't Live Here Anymore".

Brokenness does.

Jack and Terry are married. So are Edith and Hank. The couples are best friends with each other. Jack and Edith are having an affair.

Jack and Edith meet outside an auto repair shop and run off to a river bank or to a motel room and consume each other, charged by lust, excitement, despair, and make believe love. They even have a morning stand up quickie in Hank and Edith's kitchen while Hank sleeps upstairs.

The adultery becomes a virus. Jack turns on Terry, savaging her for the way she keeps house, degrading her intelligence, and belittling her as a mother. He's really savaging himself. He's haunted by his adultery and it perverts him. When Terry retaliates and has sex with Hank, Jack wants to know the details, as if Terry's detailed account, as if being a voyeur to his wife's adultery, will alleviate his guilt.

Hank, on the other hand, views his wife's adultery, and his own, with casual indifference. He thanks his best friend Jack for loving his wife, grateful that his wife seems happier around the house.

Slowly, deliberately, with scenes of long conversations and multiple close-ups of pained faces and anguished contemplation, the movie takes us deeper and deeper into the erosion of these two couples' marriages and the erosion of the relationships between the adulterers.

It's not a motion picture. It's more like seeing a play or reading a novel.

It's why this movie was not a major release, but an independent movie that showed in limited theaters.

The characters are childish, self-centered and self-absorbed, and bent on destruction of themselves and each other, whether by adultery, alcohol, petty cruelties, verbal abuse, or amoral indifference.

In this way it's an adult movie, serious, dark, literate, sad, and unnerving.

I found it absorbing and disturbing and I envied the actors for their opportunity to play such conflicted, miserable, and complex characters.

It's not a moralistic exploration of adultery. It pragmatically unfolds adultery's poison.