WELLSPRING MEDIA
Schetinin (bottom) and Neymyshev as a dreamlike Father and Son.
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We Don't Live Here Anymore
Opens Fri., Aug. 20, at Seven Gables and Uptown
Larry Gross (48 Hrs.) won the top screenwriting prize at Sundance, plus the year's most phoenixlike career resuscitation, with this amazing adaptation of Andres Dubus' Raymond Carver–ish fiction about adultery. I can't think of a truer movie about adultery, and the performances are so incendiary it's a wonder they didn't burn down the woodsy suburbs of Vancouver, B.C., where the film was shot. It's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice with a brain, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a heart.
The two couples in question are Jack and Terry Linden (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern) and Hank and Edith Evans (Peter Krause and Naomi Watts). The men are mired in modern academia, going nowhere in jobs they're lucky to have, but which scarcely pay enough to support their young families. Jack teaches English, Hank creative writing. Their main creativity gets channeled into remedying their thwarted sex lives. Terry and Edith are absolutely wonderful wife material: pretty, sexy, smart, fun.
Unfortunately, Jack and Hank are egregious assholes with immense personal magnetism. Jack is a passive-aggressive weasel who's ingenious at finding Terry's weak points and jabbing at them: It's true, she drinks too much, alternately neglects and manically overdoes the housework, and, being the intuitive type, screws up in many of life's tasks. Hank doesn't even bother to notice his wife's flaws. He's too busy ogling coeds—his fiction seminar boasts a suspicious preponderance of female beauties—and bagging grown-up women as well. And now he's got his eye on Terry.
Ruffalo, a co-producer of the film, accelerates his own rising star in the part of Jack. He's cruel and vulnerable, conniving and spontaneously clueless, hot-blooded with his secret mistress—Hank's wife Edith—and, with his own wife Terry, like a guy with liquid nitrogen for blood. Brilliantly, he makes us sympathize with him even at his most unsympathetic.
In order to get Naomi Watts, who got the film financed, the filmmakers were forced to hire Krause, the Six Feet Under hunk. He's the most lightweight actor in the bunch, but it works great—he's playing a hunk with a soul carved from styrofoam. His user's smile is blinding, his macho rivalry with Jack authentically reeking of musk. He nails the self-absorption of the successful writer. It's hard not to like him, even though underneath all that pose is just more pose.
As the "angry housewife," Watts rocks. Her face, with those expressive little pouty packets by her mouth, radiates fugitive emotions in succession: the thrill of sneaking away with Jack and banging him against a tree, the exultation of danger, the pervasive sadness that drove her into Jack's arms in the first place. "I wonder how we'll get caught?" she asks Jack, friskily, flirtily, guiltily, and deep down desperately hoping it will happen and solve the intolerable problem of her loveless marriage.
And the Oscar for 2004 goes to . . . Laura Dern as Terry. Dazzlingly but for too long, Dern was a horndog ingenue, then a cartoonish presence in movies existing in a plane skewed to reality: David Lynch flicks, Jurassic Park rides. She really was a horndog as a young woman (she told me, "I could never be a lesbian, I like cock too much!"), and some of that randy vitality shines through Terry's eyes. But there's more to Dern's persona than weirdness and lust, and Terry is her most emotionally grounded role. When Jack tormentedly drives her to give in to Hank's gropings, she's no passive victim but a courageous woman battling, ultimately, to save her marriage, however fucked-up that might sound.
Everything is so realistic in this movie: love, friendship, badinage, parties out of bounds, mornings after when you step into the spilled cat box in your socks and it's the objective correlative of your emotional state. The kids are adorable without being yucky, solemn-eyed innocent bystanders to the slo-mo car crash of their parents' love lives. The upshot is convincing without a hint of showbiz formula.
It's not a flashy film, which is why it took 23 years to get made. But when was the last time you walked out of a movie talking about the motives of the characters? And what was the last movie that had anything of substance to say about how to make love last? (R) TIM APPELO
The Clay Bird
Opens Fri., Aug. 20, at Grand Illusion
The first Bangladeshi film to receive general release in the United States and the U.K., The Clay Bird (Matir Moina) manages to portray the political/social upheavals and tensions of 1960s Pakistan by focusing almost exclusively on the complexity of one family. And one central theme could hardly be more relevant today: the conflicts between strict Islamic traditionalism and the forces of modernity.
The film weaves a complicated web centered on the character of Anu (Nurul Islam Bablu), a boy who lives in a small village in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with his strict Muslim father (Jayanto Chattopadhyay) and a more liberal-minded mother (Rokeya Prachy), who is increasingly dissatisfied with her role as the repressed wife. When Anu's father sends him to madrasa, or Islamic school, where he faces even more religious rigidity, the only thing that allows him to retain any sense of playfulness is his interaction with an imaginative, nonconformist schoolmate, Rokon (Russell Farazi). Soon after Anu settles into madrasa, the increasingly explosive tension in the family comes to a head when Anu's sister becomes gravely ill and his father refuses the modern medicine that could save her, trusting only their faith in God. This is a turning point in the film, and the story delves increasingly into the larger context of the conflict between East and West Pakistan—although not deeply enough that an uninformed viewer will take away a thorough understanding of the issues.
