TERMS OF ESTRANGEMENT

REVIEWED - WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE: John Curran follows his promising 1998 debut film, Praise, with a brooding meditation on infidelity and its consequences in We Don't Live Here Anymore. It takes its title from one of two novellas, both written by the late Cajun-Irish author Andre Dubus. Another story by Dubus served as the basis of the emotionally wrenching In the Bedroom, which also dealt with the themes of guilt and possible redemption, writes Michael Dwyer

We Don't Live Here Anymore features Mark Ruffalo as Jack, who teaches English literature at a New England college and lives in a chaotic household with his wife Terry (Laura Dern) and their two young children. Jack's best friend Hank (Peter Krause) teaches creative writing even as he struggles to write his own novel, and is married to Edith (Naomi Watts), with whom he has a daughter.

Both couples have been together for around 10 years, and the strain is beginning to show. Hank flirts openly with his female students, but seems too self-absorbed to get involved in anything less complicated than a one-night stand. Jack, however, is having a passionate adulterous affair with Edith, and turning so defensive at home with Terry that he treats her with open hostility.

Even though Jack and Terry are always strapped for cash, and Edith relies on cheques from her mother to fund her shopping sprees, neither woman shows any inclination to get a job outside the home. This may well be because Dubus wrote the two stories in the early 1980s and screenwriter Larry Gross originally adapted them for the screen over 20 years ago.

"Grown-ups fight, especially married ones," Jack, a man of weak moral fibre, tells his children, who are distressed by the nightly rows between their parents. The unfolding story is observed from the perspectives of all four adults, each of them flawed in different ways.

The film and its fine quartet of actors resist the temptation to make any of the characters overtly sympathetic as they go under the microscope in this thought-provoking drama, one grounded in realism and honesty even as it explores the dishonesty of infidelity.