Produced by Harvey Kahn, Naomi Watts, Jonas Goodman. Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, Pater Krause, Naomi Watts. If you hate your spouse or you believe your spouse no longer cares for you, why not indulge in a spot of adultery? Of course it won’t do anything to solve the problem, but it adds spice and excitement to life, and guess what, you’ll be getting back at the bitch or bastard, covertly, of course, and you might even look forward to their finding out because then you can openly lay the blame squarely at their feet, so there! (I’ve always wondered about the derivation of the word ‘adultery’. It seems so childish and stupid. Perhaps after all it bears more relation to the word ‘adulterate’: v., to debase or defile than to the word ‘adult’: n., mature.) The people in this movie seem to spend a great deal of time naked in the woods, in motels or the front seats of cars, or in the kitchen of one of their homes, adulterating their relationships. They also spend a great deal of time yelling at each other, accusing and blaming or lying to each other or practising what a contemporary well-respected marital therapy guru (whom these people will unfortunately never visit) calls ‘normal marital sadism’. The rest of the time they all pretend to be best friends. When the inevitable happened and they all find out, actually, the only one who didn’t know finds out, some change can finally happen. But not before some angst is indulged in leading to one of them seeking solace in copious bottles of Chateau Sang de Mon Mari while letting her house degenerate into a pigsty, another flirting with twenty somethings who can see it coming a mile away, and yet another considering murder (of his children) and suicide (MUCH more useful). Then at last we can get back to something else we’d much rather do instead like, say, unblocking the drains. Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause and Naomi Watts put in some fine acting, completely wasted, in this unedifying piece of dirty laundry about college professors who take self-indulgence and self-blindness to a new level. With the acting being the sole redeeming quality in this movie, it was still not worth tempting me away from the drains, which I should never have left. © Avril Carruthers 27th April 2005
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