We Don't Live Here Anymore
While poking around online looking for something totally unrelated, I found a review of the movie We Don't Live Here Anymore that interested me enough to program the DVR to find the flick and record it for me.
I hardly ever watch a complete movie anymore, especially now that I can get so many of them without paying extra over what we already budget for cable. Usually I get about 20-30 minutes in and I just can't take anymore, but I stuck through this one even though I felt ambivalent about it all the way through. It definitely didn't suck, nor did it grab me in that place where I knew right away I would love it, but it did grab me in an uncomfortable way and keep me watching it 'til the end. It was not exactly what I would consider a disturbing movie -- I saw one recently called The Dead Girl that I found disturbing -- this one was just more honest than most, to the point of being difficult to watch. After it was over, initially, I thought it was a so-so movie. But in the days that followed, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and now I'm blogging about it, so apparently I thought it was better than I realized.
Browsing through user reviews of the DVD clued me in that a fair number of folks had this exact same delayed reaction to this movie. It seems like nothing exceptional at first. Not to downplay the writing or the performances (Laura Dern was pretty amazing in it) or the directing or anything, it was all technically very good work, but none of it immediately grabs you by the throat and makes you go WHOA. It is just this decently written screenplay off of a couple of novellas by Andre Dubus about these two heterosexual couples who constitute a foursome of friends, and it is immediately evident that it is well shot and well cast as it opens with one person from each couple beginning an affair together. Right away you get heavy foreshadowing that the other two are also going to get together and have an affair, and eventually they do. Totally mundane, right? No twist, no adventure, no puzzle, no mystery. Whole movie is about that, the fights and the sex and the lack and the lies and the disclosure, nothing else happens, there are barely any other characters, few sets, even the couples' kids play like background.
But the honesty of it, in it, it lingered. It wasn't like it was entirely honest, I mean, try to catch the ocean in paper cup, right? But so many movies construct characters that are not even a little bit believable that this one was very refreshing in that way even though it was hard to watch. All four characters were under-constructed. There were enough details to present distinct personalities but too few details to make them feel truly unique. They felt almost like templates, but not in a cookie cutter identical way. They could have been anybody you know. This genericness paradoxically made them feel even more real, as if they had been drawn off of real people who maybe you do know, but who'd been stripped of their more identifying details. I don't know whether this was in the writers' minds, the screenplay writer or the writer of the original novellas, or whether they had a different approach to construction altogether, but the effect of it for me was to make the characters feel very slippery while I was watching the movie, but then creep back into my head later in this hauntingly familiar way, where do I know you from? Eh, everywhere.
We have this heterosexual monogamous model for intimate relations in which we are all expected to fit ourselves, and it comes with so much baggage and so many expectations and all of these gendered behavioral roleplay demands both between the partners and presenting together to the rest of the world, and I never met a single person in my whole life who truly fit that mold. Oh I've met some who almost fit, you know, close enough. And some who didn't seem to care that they only fractionally fit even though this generally made everyone else around them completely miserable, but those have been exceptions, as are the folks who ditch out on the molds altogether, or try to forge their own or whatever. Most everyone I meet seems to be cutting off gigantic chunks of themselves frantically trying to fit into the socially expected mold.
This movie was like a close up examination of what happens when people who have been cutting off parts of themselves to fit into that mold wake up one day and realize that they are incapable of feeling solid or whole anymore. Instead, they feel adrift and empty, in need of filling, or an anchor, or a compass, something. And they turn to each other and realize, hey, they're both empty, they're both lost. They are also exhausted, clueless as to how things got so bad, and desperate in ways they never imagined were possible, let alone common. So they turn away from each other, and they hate each other and themselves for all of it. The whole thing was heartbreaking, and it happens every day.
But it kept itself pretty honest. You hardly ever get that in a movie! Did you see it? What did you think? Have you seen anything else worth watching lately?
Labels: movies, relationships
posted by Jen @ 7:03 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
I haven't seen it but Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern are two of my favorite actors -- they just ooze intelligence and emotional honesty.
Even though I'm a poster child for long-term monogamous relationships, I honestly don't believe that they are a good idea. People's lives and needs are always in flux. The idea that through all that change on both sides, two people would want to be always intimately connected is nonsensical and probably detrimental. I suspect that inertia has a lot to do with marriages that last decades (although Jim and I have determined that our secret to a lasting marriage is an uneven number of pets).
A rather fun but flawed movie that Jim and I watched recently was Across the Universe which is a sort of musical -- it integrates the music of the Beatles into the story in a very imaginative way.
I keep meaning to watch Across the Universe and I keep forgetting about it, thank you for the reminder. ::wanders off to program the DVR::
Okay where was I?
Mark Ruffalo is also very good, he is like the I-guy from whose pov the audience sees most of the story. I kept wanting to grab his character by the shirt front and shake him until he agreed to communicate better with his wife.
All four of the lead actors are beautiful people, but it's hard to experience any attraction to any of them even during the sex scenes because there is so much guilt and pain mixed into every aspect of their story. Which was part of the staying power of it, I think, all of these conflicting and intense emotions in a big messy pile, problematizing the idea that there's such a thing as discrete emotions...
...or relationships or even our own identities, depending on the level of analysis you want to use. All of the four characters had multiple reads available, they were quite vividly gray in that way, and you don't see that sort of character construction very often, at least not through a whole cast like that, even small as it was.
I suspect that inertia has a lot to do with marriages that last decades
(lol at the pets.) Yeah, I'm sure you're right that that's a common force. In this story it played out like people had these social scripts they never questioned would lead them into happy, satisfying lives, and just no fucking plan whatsoever for how to handle it when they discovered how miserable and disconnected they had become.
I think most people never really examine the basic script that gets peddled to us all (go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, send the kids to college so they can get a job, get married, have kids who will go to college ....). That way if you achieve it, you can know you've done good and are happy without ever having to examine how you might actually feel about your life and whether any of those things make you happy. And if you don't achieve it, well then you know exactly where you've gone wrong and what you have to do be happy, even if you don't actually want any of those things. But one of the great things that has come from gender and queer theory is the taking apart of the standard script and all its assumptions and implications, an analysis which helps people who really don't want that script to rip it up and throw it away.
vividly gray
Great oxymoron ... really does a good job of packing a lot of meaning into a small space.
Yes, yes. And thanks. :)
(I'm watching the marriage argument in CA right now, which is alternatively awesome and painful. ::breathe breathe::)
I watched a little of it (my satellite broadband has usage limits and streaming video just eats it up) where they were giving the guy are hard time about invalidating existing marriages. I hope the rest of it went like that.
I'm still chewing on what I think the judges thought -- it's hard to tell with them, sometimes they argue fiercest against the side they favor and I don't know anything about this particular court.
Watching Ken Starr argue that mob rule was a foundational principle of a functional democracy was like falling into a fucking Dali painting. To the superficial, I had never heard him argue before, only read him, and he sounds creepy as hell, sorta like the way Mr. Rogers might have sounded if he had been a serial killer.
I thought the arguments for the side with a conscience were a mixed bag, with one attorney (named Stewart, maybe?) who stood out head and shoulders above the rest. One of her better arguments imo was that a constitutional guarantee of equality that can be voted away selectively for a minority is no guarantee at all, but I'm not sure how much weight that really has w/r/t to the specific issues before this court in this case, which really aren't about the merits of queer equality as much as some eggheaded procedural rules about how Californians may or may not govern themselves and each other.
Someone who is veteran watcher of the California Supreme Court would probably know how to judge the proceedings. I'd like to feel optimistic about it but I don't. But maybe that's just because I don't feel optimistic about much of anything these days.
I pay some attention to the CA supreme court, and I don't have any clue what they're going to do here, either. It would be incredibly, incredibly daring for them to overturn prop 8, to be honest, and it's hard to feel optimistic about that. But I think they're holding their cards extremely close to their (collective?) chest on this one, even for judges.
On the post, I've not seen the film, but of course issues surrounding social expectations and monogamy and so forth are very much on my mind always, and especially lately. There are real difficulties in constructing something completely different from the monogamous, unquestioned, traditionally structured two-people relationship in a society that creates both individual expectations and social assumptions around that idea. Those difficulties are shaking the holy shit out of my world right now, in fact.
Which isn't to say that my sort of philosophical ideas on relationships and family and so forth are hugely changing, just that it is, as I've noted with my own gender shit, hard to build something different from the social assumptions without either being destroyed by them or winding up reflecting them anyway.
Andi, I don't feel very optimistic about it either.
Spit, I'm so sorry that you're having a rough go of things. I agree that it is ridiculously hard to do all that much that is all that different. Even under the best of conditions, and we never get those.
Post a Comment
<< Home