Based on two short stories by André Bubois, John Curran's film sets out to be a provocative take on married life and its discontents. It is set in a small New England town where the two men involved (Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause) are close friends who teach at the local university.
We watch as they fall for each other's wives (Naomi Watts and Laura Dern), who are thereby made exceedingly unhappy, the more so because there are children involved.
The men are not very admirable specimens. Ruffalo's Jack, who begins a steamy affair with Watts's Edith, thinks he's in love with her; Krause's Hank gratefully receives the attentions of Dern's Terry after she can't find any real satisfaction from her husband.
It's a storyline that has been told a lot, and will doubtless be repeated again in other movies with plotlines of greater variety than this. In the end it is impossible not to think: so what?
The pleasure, though, is in the acting and the direction, which are both first-class, with Watts and Ruffalo particularly outstanding as two people who know they are on a hiding to nothing but can't help their mutual attraction.
Larry Gross's script, too, is a plus. I definitely wanted to know what was going to happen to this quartet of friends making such a mess of their lives. We are, however, never really told. Which may have been the point of the exercise in the first place, since life, Curran seems to say, is a constant query that only ends at the grave.
