If you're about to get married, make time to watch We Don't Live Here Anymore. The relentlessly downbeat drama, taken from two short stories by In the Bedroom author Andre Dubus, shows marriage as a pitch-black pit of despair from which infidelity is the only temporary (but illusionary) respite.
The film is an actor's showcase, with Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause as professors Jack and Hank, and Laura Dern and Naomi Watts as their wives, Terry and Edith. All mundanely unhappy, they start the ball rolling with an affair between Jack and Edith, and soon Terry and Hank are pushed into their own vindictive adultery. The cast is wonderful, and Watts is fast becoming one of the best actresses around.
But once director John Curran and screenwriter Larry Gross set things up, the film stagnates and all the emotional blustering is strangely unmoving at times. We Don't Live Here Anymore manages to get at some difficult truths, and the actors embody their characters with real emotion, but there's a certain distance to it all that prevents it from being a truly heart-wrenching film.