“Too sad,” Mark Ruffalo’s character says toward the end of this film from 2004, succinctly summing up the preceding hour and a half of marital warfare. Arguably, director John J. Curran’s greatest accomplishment is managing to end the movie, which is sometimes almost too painful to watch, on a hopeful note without resorting to maudlin platitudes or a song by Sarah McLachlan.
Woody Allen’s Husband and Wives without the laughs, Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage without the subtitles, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut without the masks, We Don’t Live Here Anymore boasts terrific performances from Ruffalo (fine in this year’s Zodiac), Laura Dern, Peter Krause, and co-producer Naomi Watts.
Larry Gross’s screenplay, based on Andre Dubus’s novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore and short story “Adultery,” guides — but doesn’t drag — the viewer through a psychic minefield fraught with every imaginable method of harm we humans can inflict upon one another without actually drawing blood.