Very well executed

Awesome Movie

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

..sure, when you're that unhappy in your marriage start screwing the husband of your best friends... it'll work out in the end for sure... in all the dialogue of this intensely worded production, the final couple lines say it all... "... why would you do it... because I can"... add it all up and these four admirable actors have been in a host of films.. they are all without doubt among the best in their profession.. here's a film that according to numbers on the IMDb site barely made two million dollars (says it est cost to make to be three million).. yet there are many movies on the subject don't nearly do it a fraction as well as this one... ten, twenty years plus.. it won't loose a thing

The title of this review says there are amazing performances, which is perhaps a lie. The performances are definitely strong, but it's Laura Dern who really packs a bigger punch than the other three. She has perhaps the meatiest material and she knocks it out of the park, she's powerful and sad and heartbreaking to watch, while at the same time very flawed. Dern should feel proud of stealing this film away. Watts and Ruffalo are good, but Krause seems to be half asleep during this. I guess it doesn't help that he has the least amount of screen time, but there could have been something to latch on to in his portrayal. As it is there's nothing. Strong film though.

the marriage as game. hunt. cage. the tension, indifference, cruelty, fear, need of the other, masks, words out of common language, hope, sacrifices, escapes. and an empty circle. nothing new. but this film is different. not for the friendship of families, not for good performance but for rules of games. Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause are faces of one character. the physical similitude is part of same gestures. Laura Dern is another version , at different age, of Naomi Watts. all is a new form of Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf. only space is different. its charm source is possibility to be picture for many families. prefiguration, image of ordinary crisis, end of any hope form. nothing complicated. only games.

My expectations were probably too high, despite being wary of the second adaptation of one of my favorite authors. I didn't really care for IN THE BEDROOM because it didn't telegraph all the nuance of emotion found in Dubus' perfect, concise short fiction. Looks like it didn't work this time either.The credits tell us this film is based on both novellas "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Adultery" yet it only incorporates the last paragraph of the latter. Without the rest of those pages, this turnaround for Edith (Naomi Watts)--which the filmmakers plop into the last three minutes after spending the majority of the previous 99 minutes in her lover Jack's POV--doesn't have its desired denouement effect on an audience: we just think Edith has given up, not made a healthy choice to better her life and grow up. The filmmakers made a similar misstep in their handling of Jack's final choice. In the end of the eponymous novella, our narrator Jack (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film) tells us his spirit is dying in a marriage going nowhere even though like Tolstoy's Ivan Ivanovitch--which is briefly referenced in both works--he appears to have found the light; yet in the film, we witness a man ultimately choosing family because it's the right thing to do--a completely different emotional journey.I really like all four leads but I just found myself wanting more from each of them. Maybe that way we could have seen more of Dubus' original intentions and character arcs with his novellas. In the stories, the characters are three dimensional and you can forgive their shortcomings because of it. In this film, everybody comes off selfish: you can't root for any of them. On the page we witness redemption, even in Jack's selfish choice to "sacrifice" his future happiness. On screen we see an actor playing a man who just wants people to be happy--and he thinks he can be if he gives up his affair.At least the actors were all swinging for the fences. Peter Krause gets the least screen time but he was the best of the leads and the closest to the character Dubus created. I hope he escapes the shadow of HBO because I've thought he's a special actor ever since I was one of the ten people to tune in to SPORTS NIGHT on a regular basis. Laura Dern is given a meaty role in Terry, Jack's jilted wife, but she just plays every scene like Nicole Kidman in EYES WIDE SHUT, only not as good. Terry was created well before Kubrick made that last film but it's hard to get Kidman's panty-clad lustful confession out of your head watching Dern act mad and yell not only because they're similar scenes but because Kidman is still stunning and Dern looks tired. I know, superficial, but that's what I thought. On the other hand, Naomi Watts is very sexy and gives it her all but she's just a sketch of a hurt person, not a well rounded or believably motivated character. I didn't feel we learned all that much from her speech in the hotel or that scene of her crying--they seemed like plot devices the filmmakers had to use to justify their choices with the last act. The last act doesn't work because of that final scene with Edith and also because of what I said about Jack's choice. Ruffalo is very good, but he's playing a different Jack than the Jack on Dubus' pages.Bottom line: read the novellas. Especially "Finding A Girl In America", it's my favorite. All three of the novellas were published in a book under the title of the film and it has a great introduction from Dubus' son, Andre Dubus III, who wrote HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (also manhandled on screen). It was the essay by the screenwriter that made me give the movie a shot but I don't think the film works as well as it could have. They should have either made it just that first story or actually explored the whole series of novellas for a movie that could have become a classic to stand alongside something like Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Maybe you should just rent that.