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Movie Review: We Don't Live Here Anymore
By William Sternman
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We
Don't Live Here Anymore
Starring Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Mark Rufallo, and Peter Krause
Written by Larry Gross, Directed by John Curran
Close to the end of David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945),
Celia Johnson, distraught over the breakup of her affair with Trevor Howard,
runs to the edge of a railroad platform intending to throw herself in
front of an oncoming train. She doesn’t. In the flashing lights
of the passing carriages, we see her grief-stricken face and experience
her pain. It is one of the most heart-breaking scenes in the movies.
There’s a somewhat similar scene in this new John Curran film. Naomi Watts, upset over the breakup of both her marriage and her love affair, is waiting in her car at a crossing for a train to pass by. You could infer from the look on her face that she is considering crashing into the train and killing herself. I felt nothing for her and her dilemma. My only concern was that she’d also be killing her daughter (Jennifer Bishop), who is sitting beside her.
The difference between the older movie (based on Noël Coward’s one-act play “Still Life”) and the newer one (based on two stories by Andre Dubus) is that in Brief Encounter the characters are real people whose emotions reverberate inside you, while in We Don’t Live Here Anymore they’re just talking heads and gyrating bodies.
That railroad crossing is as phony as anything else in this movie. Although it serves no plot function whatsoever, we are shown the lowering gate (indicating an oncoming train) again and again. Perhaps it’s symbolic: if you pass over this barrier, tragedy will strike. More likely, it’s what used to be called in creative short-story writing classes a “pointer.” Like the spot of blood on Ashley Judd’s white dress in De-Lovely, it’s supposed to prepare us psychologically for a coming event. If that’s the case, it violates Anton Chekhov’s rule that a “shotgun introduced on page one must go off before the end of the story.” This popgun is filled with blanks anyway.
The two male leads (Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause) are both writers and English teachers. They read a lot (always fun to watch), write a lot (even more fun to watch) and talk a lot (which could have been the most fun of all if only the script had been written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz or Noël Coward, instead of Larry Gross). Mark screws Peter’s wife, Naomi Watts, a lot, which is about the most fun this movie has to offer, but it is also counterbalanced by Laura Dern’s (Mark’s wife) incessant shrillness (even less fun than watching someone read).
The actors deserve better. Mark Ruffalo gave an extraordinary performance as Laura Linney’s screwed-up (no pun intended) brother in You Can Count on Me (2000), but has rarely been given a role even half as challenging. I don’t think he’s capable of giving a performance that doesn’t ring true —even in a throwaway part like The Last Castle (2001). But his forte is opening his character up so you can see the child inside the adult’s clothing. The scene in the 2000 movie in which he’s telling Linney what he’s been doing since he last saw her and suddenly, and unexpectedly, breaks into tears is just such an epiphany.
In this movie, he’s great with his kids (Sam Charles and Haili Page), but otherwise, he’s too coolly detached to touch your heart in any way.
Peter Krause is as blandly likeable as he is in Six Feet Under, a far more compelling drama (Although it’s about a funeral parlor, it’s certainly livelier. Even the corpses sit up, take notice and comment wryly on the action from time to time. One even has an erection. Being dead obviously means never having to say you’re sorry you can’t get it up). Laura Dern, looking surprisingly haggard, seems always to be screaming or whining. And Naomi Watts is lovely to look at and even lovelier to imagine oneself having sex with, despite the fact that her character is named Edith Evans.
The title is as misleading as a Bush-administration half-truth. Wherever else they may have lived--in the pages of Dubus' stories, for example--these characters never lived here.
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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
©
2004 Me Three