In a key scene during the bleak marital drama We Don't Live Here Anymore, a man feigns sleep as his cheating wife skulks into their bedroom well after hours. He knows that she has just stolen away to the front seat of their car for a vigorous session with his best friend, which should count as one of the most devastating moments of his life. And yet he waits expectantly, like a child on Christmas Eve, barely able to contain his anticipation. It's an achievement of sorts that the film makes sense of his perverse feelings, because they're so far removed from common experience.
Based on a pair of stories by the late Andre Dubus, whose short fiction also formed the basis for 2001's majestically gloomy In The Bedroom, We Don't Live Here Anymore deals with broken marriages that are long past counseling and ready for the scrap heap. Both couples involved have young kids, but their hopes of reconciling for the children's benefit are dwindling; now, they're looking for happiness wherever they can find it, especially if it means hurting each other. Director John Curran (Praise) doesn't soften or compromise their behavior for the audience's benefit, but reveals these deeply flawed people as they really are, capable of awful deceit and petty point-scoring.
With performances that go to 11, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, and Laura Dern play the miserable quartet, all of whom are so openly flirtatious with each other that it's hard to tell the illicit pairings from the official ones. Both Krause and Ruffalo are teachers at a small college; the former agonizes over a failed novel while the latter sneaks off for trysts with Watts, Krause's distant wife, behind his back. Their secret meetings, arranged through transparent lies on both ends, offer Ruffalo some escape from his own bad marriage to Dern, a lazy, combative housewife who constantly gets on his nerves. Inevitably, Krause and Dern take an interest in each other—and, just as inevitably, their sins lead to a painful reckoning.
In Curran's hands, what might have seemed like a Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? redux gets cut into avant-garde pieces, with experimental inserts, sound effects, and wrinkles in time that add to an uneasy mood. To his credit and detriment, he doesn't do anything to make these characters more ingratiating or noble—they're weak, self-destructive, and vicious when cornered, and it takes bottomless sympathy to not reject them entirely. When one character compares her life with a gorilla licking its hands after shitting on them, it's hard to escape the thought that these characters belong in their zoos.