When I learned that the screenplay for this movie had been written 25 years ago, it all started to make sense. It watches like an Updike novel reads; everybody's miserable and horny, the women are cardboard figures with no careers, the guys are unlikable but you're supposed to cheer for them anyway. Didn't read the Dubus stories but I believe they come from the same era (and I'll bet they're better than the film.) A reviewer described Laura Dern's mouth as being "a rictus of pain" and that was a good description, but frankly I didn't want to watch so much rictus all the time. Her close-ups were excruciating, especially back to back with the flawless Naomi Watts; it seemed highly improbable that Peter Krause would be attracted to her with Naomi in the house. But the worst part was that it was utterly humorless. At the screening I went to the laughs were strictly uncomfortable ones. Then I got bogged down in a few improbabilities. If Naomi Watts is that much of a clean freak, what's she doing having sex out in the woods? How come Peter Krause's character has money and Mark Ruffalo's doesn't, when they basically have the same job? And is there some rule that all English professors have to wear beards? Couldn't one of them have been clean shaven? Why don't the women seem to have jobs?
I came away feeling that the whole thing was a grim enterprise, lacking poetry or coherence.
I came away feeling that the whole thing was a grim enterprise, lacking poetry or coherence.