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We
Don't Live Here Anymore
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When John Curran directed Praise (1999), one of the best Australian films of its decade, a familiar political critique was raised. Why did Curran concentrate on purely personal relationships and overlook the social, multicultural issues of the story's Queensland setting? Now working in America, Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore continues this single-minded focus on intimate life. Because the characters are no longer marginalised, grunge figures as in Praise but affluent middle-class citizens in a New England college town, Curran is even more likely to be accused of propagating mere 'bourgeois melodrama' that lacks a social conscience. Taken on its own terms, however, We Don't Live Here Anymore is a subtle, finely wrought work. Screenwriter Larry Gross has skilfully combined two stories about middle-class, marital malaise by Andre Dubus (another of his disquieting tales was adapted as In the Bedroom [2001]). Jack (Mark Ruffalo) is a blocked writer. As a home-maker, his wife, Terry (Laura Dern), exhibits the same lack of flair immortalised by Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) – burning meals, forgetting essential items, dwelling in messy dysfunctionality. Jack is carrying on an affair with Edith (Naomi Watts), whose Lit Prof husband, Hank (Peter Krause), seems a little too interested in his young, female students. But when Terry starts to suspect the infidelity, Jack's perverse response is to try to nudge her into a compensatory fling with Hank. Emotional disaster looms. This is a beautifully acted ensemble piece, and Curran keeps the film's style firmly centred on the performers (two of whom also serve as producers). Gross' script tries occasionally to weave a fancy structure around this simple character-configuration, or bend the realistic dialogue into something more poetic – such as when Terry explains to Jack that "to open your legs is a promise". This is the kind of solemn drama that, fundamentally, offers no real diagnosis of the ills it presents, let alone proposing a solution for them. It is grimly content to watch things fall apart, tracking an inexorable logic of mutual destruction. The film contemplates the difficulty, even the impossibility of marriage and the nuclear family unit, blaming the problems on something called human nature, rather than the modern world. That attitude precisely marks the defeatist limit of bourgeois melodrama. But, within this limit, Curran excels. © Adrian Martin May 2005 |
