A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, January 29, 2026

We Don't Live Here Anymore (John Curran, 2004)

Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, and Laura Dern in We Don't Live Here Anymore

Cast: Mark Ruffalo. Laura Dern, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts, Sam Charles, Ginger Page, Jennifer Bishop, Amber Rothwell, Meg Roe, Jim Francis, Marc Baur, Patrick Earley. Screenplay: Larry Gross, based on stories by Andre Dubus. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Tony Devenyi. Film editing: Alexandre de Franceschi. Music: Michael Convertino. 

Even a quartet of accomplished actors can't save John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore from the fact that none of the characters they play is interesting enough to elicit our concern about what happens to  them. The Lindens, Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Terry (Laura Dern), and the Evanses, Hank (Peter Krause) and Edith (Naomi Watts), are thirtysomethings living in a town where Jack and Hank teach at the local college. Jack and Edith are having an affair, and the tensions their sneaking around causes eventually drive Terry into a reciprocal affair with Hank. At some point it occurred to me that these marital disputes were really none of my business, and that I didn't really care if or how they worked things out. The film tries to keep us involved, laying on Michael Convertino's melancholy score to elicit emotions that the screenplay fails to inspire, but in the end I was left with nothing but the pleasure of watching actors act. 

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