We Don't Live Here Anymore is much easier to admire than it is to enjoy. It is a tour-de-force of acting, but only in the service of profoundly helpless, self-absorbed, and unhappy characters chattering endlessly about their lives as if they are all that matter in the universe.

Story

Jack and Terry (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern) are an unhappy couple, stifled by years of sullen, barely concealed rage, Jack's inertia, and Terry's drinking. Their friends Hank and Edith (Peter Krause and Naomi…

"I wonder how we'll get caught," says Edith (Naomi Watts) after some illicit sex in the woods with Jack (Mark Ruffalo). Jack is best buds with Hank (Peter Krause), Edith's husband. And Edith is tight with Terry (Laura Dern), Jack's wife, who decides to screw Hank in retaliation. So it goes on this New England campus where Jack and Hank teach, help their wives raise the kids and betray each other through adultery they don't try that hard to conceal.

Based on two short stories by Andre Dubus (In…