Good concept, poorly executed.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

I have begun to see this film, without any hope, to see it. It has been a pleasant surprise, I will not say it is a film for posterity, but if it is a good movie. Also one of the things I like about her is that in her characters we see several types of people, not just a guy, the one who takes today and who is the good, but there are several types and none is good , Are signs of reality.It is independent cinema, would like to see in Spain independent cinema with this range of actors. They are all great. Seeing Naomi, I was surprised, I had not seen an actress cry for a long time and not cover her eyes, to see the whole face. I do not know if it will be your thing or it will be the direction of actors, but I was pleasantly surprised.Just start, there is cut, inside a car and use it to change sequence. I was very surprised, independent film is usually basically screenplay, not characterized by doing this kind of thing.Photography is better than the average of this type of cinema. It is not white, but it does accompany the film. It is not beautiful or perfect but if it is worked.Apart from those details commented before, the rest in terms of direction, is simple. A great direction of actors, but simple plans. It does not bore, except the moments in which the film is forgotten and is going to see planes of nature or becomes poetic. Those moments lower the film.Overall a nice movie.Spoiler:What I like about the actors is that they present us with several types of characters. The coward that although not happy, continues with his life. Also part of the liberals in love, but only until I suffer. Also the honest, I know I've done something wrong and I deal with it, for me.

English professor Jack (Ruffalo) is married to slobby Terry (Dern) and carruying on with his friend's foxy wife Edith (Watts). Edith's husband, failed novelist Hank (Krause), is carrying on with Terry and, apparently, half of New England. It's a right old carry on.This one's been sold as a "provocative drama", but it's really just a souped-up soap opera with pretensions to artistic importance. There are few searing insights here, save for an aside to the kids that "Grown ups fight - especially married ones".Clunking symbolism abounds; from a tangled, primordial forest surrounding the college campus in which Jack and Edith play Adam and Eve ("Easy, sailor!" gasps Watts' Edith hilariously, while she's penetrated against a tree), to animal-themed wallpaper and Watts' hushed revelation that we're all little more than "gorillas in a zoo licking it off our hands". Tell, don't show, is their watchword.In mitigation, the ensemble cast are mostly sound, given the limitations of their material. Ruffalo's the model of a prematurely-induced mid-life crisis; whether deliberately picking fights to hasten a relationship's demise (a process applied with precisely the opposite aim in Edward Albee's sharper 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), or taking perverse delight in the ins-and-outs of Terry's adulterous tit-for-tat tryst, thus assuaging his own guilt.Dern's wronged housewife is a sight to behold, if not exactly savour, her face contorted almost beyond recognition into a mask of pain. Krause, too, impresses in his first major screen role as a self-absorbed pleasure-seeker and deliverer of platitudes who breezily informs Jack to "love all the people you can", utterly oblivious to the hurt he leaves behind.Yet these are all characters in search of a decent screenplay. "Looks like it's going to snow", murmurs Dern toward the maddeningly ambivalent climax, and it's typical of the script, and of its delivery, that you can practically see the actors sight reading off their portentous autocues.

How many times has this theme been re-worked over and over. I was expecting something halfway decent from the ratings at IMDb and a pretty decent cast: Peter Krause, Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern and Naomi Watts.The same beaten up old story of spouse swapping. Desperately unhappy people living together with no backstory as to how they got to be so dissatisfied with their lot. Cute backdrop of children. Ongoing and incessant shots of a train, so much so I kept waiting for one of the stars to splat off the front end. No such luck.Males are two selfish professors, women are housewives - I think, it is never clear.Laura Dern looks as if she should creak when she walks, all her bones are visible and her face keeps morphing into a rictus of death. Someone please feed her.Peter just about phoned his performance in and Mark bumbles along in an agony of guilt. Naomi is about the most alert of the bunch.The train keeps roaring through the level crossing. It is the most lively character in this whole sorry mess.2 out of 10.

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.