Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Marriage is a lot of things to a lot of people. The one thing it is to virtually everyone is plain hard work. It takes a lot of energy to maintain a relationship on such an intimate (in many ways) level over the years. The problem with marriage on film is that it is far too often portrayed as some sort of end in and of itself. We see the contrived beginnings of blissful couplehood, maybe a glorious wedding, but not how two people manage to survive together through mortgages and diapers and aging and all the stuff that comes after those first heady Hollywood moments. We Don’t Live Here Anymore takes the gloves off and gives us marriage. Messy, ugly marriage. So messy and ugly that most of us will come away with a new appreciation for our own spouses.

Our principal players here consist of two couples; Jack and Terry Linden (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern) and Hank and Edith Evans (Peter Krause and Naomi Watts). The couples are friends; Jack and Edith are sleeping together. So sets up the essential conflict at the core of the film. How will these couples deal with their varying states of dissatisfaction with their lives as currently structured? The infidelity is the catalyst through which we examine these relationships.

The great thing about film is that we get to have characters that range from complete fantasy to absolute reality and everything in between. We Don’t Live Here Anymore gives us four people that embody all that is fallible and ugly about human relationships. Certainly, they must have their good sides, but that isn’t what this film is about. This film is about examining the unattractive, selfish, crude and unsavory parts of the married psyche. Jack is the whining malcontent. He’s unfaithful to his wife, and then demeans her as a way of assuaging his own guilt. Terry is the wife who can do no right, who tries and fails to be the person her husband wants. She fails to bring any semblance of wholeness into the relationship, instead relying on Jack to provide her with an identity. Hank is the narcissist who really cares for nothing and no one beyond himself. He’s perfectly good natured about it, but he’s distant and has virtually no emotional investment in his own relationships. Edith is the angry wife trying desperately to hurt a husband who simply doesn’t care. She uses other people to try and get his attention rather than really addressing the issue at hand.

So, yeah. These are not great people. They’re pretty high on the loathsome scale. But in each of them, we find a kernel of universality. We’re all a little whiny, a little clingy and needy, a little distant, a little angry. These people embody those most unattractive of human traits that we all carry with us and makes us look them in the face and realize that they could be us. For that we need to hate them, and we do. Yet we’re drawn into their world because we recognize them, we want to know how they, the distillation of these ugly traits, manage to make peace with their seemingly completely abhorrent and untenable situations. The dialogue between the couples and indeed, all the characters, is tight, tense and frightfully real. We may not particularly like them, but we become invested in their world. The conversations are so intimate that we feel like we’re eavesdropping, almost uncomfortable with the depth with which we’re reaching into these relationships. They hold nothing back – the swearing, the tears, the accusations, the lies, the ugly truths. Marriage in We Don’t Live Here Anymore is not just hard, it’s brutal.

So why would you want to see this film filled with people you don’t like and uncomfortable situations? Because this is the essence of all the bad stuff that can happen to a relationship. It’s like a primer on what kind of person nobody should be and how nobody should conduct their lives. The four primary actors are excellent, with Mark Ruffalo leading the way as the most despicable of the four. His treatment of his wife in the face of his own guilt is abhorrent, but recognizable. He betrays her and must, in his own mind, find a reason, something she did, to soothe his own conscience. Admirable? No. Real? Oh, yes. Ruffalo pulls off this character with great success, making us dislike him yet squirmingly see some bit of ourselves in his actions. Dern is over the top in her flailing attempts to somehow change to make her marriage into something that it simply isn’t. She’s excellent in her perpetual state of disarray, in her desperation, in her immediately identifiable need to make things better. My only quibble with her appearance here is that she is painfully thin, unattractively so. She needs a sandwich.

Naomi Watts as Edith is transparent in her motivations. Her desire to make her husband notice her through bad behavior is such a universal that the smallest of children do it to their parents. Negative attention is better than no attention. She uses a masterful number of facial expressions ranging from bereft, to angry, to resigned. She could also use a sandwich. Peter Krause has the smallest of the four roles. And perhaps the least relatable. He’s so detached from his relationship that it’s hard to believe he ever valued it at all. We don’t end up caring much about him, because he does that perfectly well on his own. He isn’t mean or evil, he just doesn’t really care about the ins and outs of his marriage. Krause doesn’t have as much to work with as the others, so his character feels a bit less complete.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore isn’t an easy film. It doesn’t have cuddly protagonists, it doesn’t have an uplifting moral, it doesn’t even have funny little quirky moments to make it light and fluffy and break the tension. What it does have is a pointed look at the ugliness that potentially lurks in even the most outwardly happy union. It’s a brilliant cautionary tale about not taking your relationship for granted and not letting the less admirable parts of the human psyche take over your existence. It’s guaranteed to be a discussion starter among couples, which can only, in the end, be a good thing. Better to hate the people on the screen than to ignore the potential we all have to be less than perfect and end up being one of them.


Recommended: Yes