Product Description

Jack and Terry. Hank and Edith. They're married couples and best friends with much in common. Jack and Hank are professors at Cedar County College. Terry and Edith are stay-at-home moms. And Jack and Edith are secret lovers. Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Peter Krause and Naomi Watts play the interlocked foursome, pushing their characters into uncharted realms of anger, confrontation and lust - and making decisions that might or might not let love slip away.

DVD Features:
Scene Access
Theatrical Trailer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37767 in DVD
• Brand: WATTS,NAOMI
• Released on: 2004-12-14
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, Surround Sound, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.com
Few movies offer as intimate a portrait of a fragmenting marriage as We Don't Live Here Anymore. Jack (Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me) and Terry (Laura Dern, Citizen Ruth) are best friends with Edith (Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive) and Hank (Peter Krause, HBO's Six Feet Under)--but Edith and Jack, frustrated with their own marriages, have fallen into an affair that gradually erodes all of their lives. Most movies pretend their sex scenes are really about the characters' emotions; in this case, it's true. The movie's greatest strength, however, is that it's as much about parents and children as husbands and wives; the children of both marriage are as caught up in the events as the adults, and are often more clear-eyed about it all. The whole cast turns in strong performances, but Ruffalo and Dern are particularly vivid. A sad, hopeful, beautiful movie. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
In this extraordinary adaptation of two Andre Dubus novellas from the nineteen-seventies, Laura Dern is a woman married to a mediocre college English teacher (Mark Ruffalo) in New England. When her husband begins an affair with her best friend (Naomi Watts), she takes revenge, with her husband's guilty help, by sleeping with her best friend's husband (Peter Krause). The movie is so beautifully made, and so strong emotionally, that the potentially dreary material is actually thrilling. The director, John Curran, lets the squalling marital fights between Ruffalo and Dern swell and crest without unnecessary emphasis. The entire production is precise, vibrant, and, for all its turmoil, extremely moving. Michael Convertino did the music, and Maryse Alberti did the lovely cinematography, which builds a canopy of nature over the characters, season by season, and lets us know that, unhappy or not, they will survive. The screenplay is by Larry Gross. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

brilliant treatment of stallled marriages
This is one of the best films I have ever seen on what happens to many marriages: after a long time together, the partners pull away from eachother and wonder if they are still in love. Life is taken over by routine and the demands of work; frustration grows. The pain of this stage of life - when people begin to ask, "is this it?" - is vividly portrayed in this film. None of the characters are judged as they act out and seek some way to feel they are still alive, while having to take care of their kids and the banalities of house cleaning and their petty disagreements. Their dilemma is far more common than we would like to imagine.

This is very hard to watch, but its realism is quite extraordinary and shockingly intimate, with a depth vastly superior to the romantic fluff of hollywood. Even the way that the characters change in this moment of crisis is believable and all too human. Some can grow beyond it, some cannot. THere is wisdom in this truly great drama. And the acting in uniformly brilliant, approaching the complexity of real life.

Warmly recommended, but be prepared for a very rough ride.

The Unkindest Cut
Andre Dubus's novella on which this film is based can be read and interpreted a couple of ways: as an "The Ice Storm" like evisceration of 2 lonely, masochistic couples or as an "The Ice Storm" evisceration of 2 lonely masochistic couples whom Dubus shows not only understanding for but also shows that they can be saved, they can be redeemed, there is enough humanity within them to care about.
This film of "We Don't Live here Anymore" tells the story of Jack Linden (Mark Ruffalo, who just gets better and better), who is married to Terry (Laura Dern) and Hank Evans (Peter Krause) who is married to Edith (the luminous Naomi Watts).
All four have lost their way and are having affairs with the other's spouse: they have forgotten how to love and sex is now all they have to experience any kind of feeling. Their pairings are mechanical, if there is any so-called Love, it is fleeting and only of the moment. These are people who have experienced Love and found it to be lacking. They talk a lot, they fight and argue more: but all of it means nothing and seems to only be a means to pass the day without slitting their throats.
Where director Curran gets it right though is how he shows that nothing, none of the arguments leads to any kind of easy resolutions: in fact there is no resolution to any of this at all. Curran presents, I think a very contemporary and ambiguous view of his characters and of life really: it's messy, we sometimes are with the wrong people, Love mostly doesn't last but no matter what, we have options, we have hope.

Scenes from a modern marriage
This low-key drama confronts infidelity and marital discontent through the private dramas of two couples. Both Hank (Peter Krause) and Jack (Mark Ruffalo) are teachers at a community college, Hank an aspiring novelist who treats infidelity as a necessary adjunct to his life. The most sophisticated of the four, he embraces the romance of the writer's ancillary angst, women serving as both inspiration and gratification. His wife, Edith (Naomi Watts) is aware of Hank's indiscretions, increasingly bitter and disappointed with her marriage, but unwilling to act.

Edith and Hank are good friends with Jack and Terry (Laura Dern), socializing frequently, a source of titillation for a clandestine affair between Jack and Edith. Edith embarks on the affair partly from spite and partly from devastating loneliness, but Jack is not as cavalier as his fellow adulterer, blindsided by daydreams of his lover and irritated by Terry's obvious flaws. As Jack, Ruffalo is sensitive and thoughtful, playing the formerly faithful husband with subtle grace, sinking into a moral quagmire that renders him unable to stop the affair or leave his wife. This man enjoys the comforts of marriage, children and the routine, almost undone by the risks he is taking to meet Edith.

The jewel of the movie is Laura Dern as Terry, her performance flawless as the confused, wounded wife who senses her husband's betrayal but won't confront him, crippled by her own inadequacies. Dern and Ruffalo move in perfect counterpoint, circling their marriage, challenged in ways they never anticipated. He obsesses over the other woman and adores his children, but there is more emotional depth here than may appear. This is a man who cannot abide his own betrayal. Edith realizes that eventually the affair will be exposed, almost anticipating the ensuing confrontation.

Under the direction of John Curran, the insightful script is riveting in the hands of these actors, the subdued atmosphere belying a tight undercurrent of tension, a sense that something terrible might happen to these people, especially Jack and Terry. The director manipulates this tension to pull the characters back and forth, their interactions emotionally charged, until finally the truth of each marriage is revealed. This movie has been compared to The Ice Storm, but I never made any such connection when watching the film. The Ice Storm is cynical, a study in carelessness, but this film carries the weight of truth, how easily marriage gets side-tracked by tedium, how simple it is to forget the cost of infidelity.

Krause plays an egocentric, insensitive cad, Watts the long-suffering wife driven to her own solutions, but Dern is the heart of the movie, waxing hot and cold, caught up in her own deceptions, bruised by Jack's betrayal, both of them torn between need and responsibility. The couple is faced with the consequences of their actions, where nothing happens in a vacuum and the children pay the price of their parent's self-indulgence. There are no easy answers, no great epiphany, only hard truths and the concessions demanded by modern marriage. Luan Gaines/2005.