We Don't Live Here Anymore is a small, drab, often excruciating movie -- and thank the Lord for that. Based on two Andre Dubus short stories, it's a startlingly plain and intelligent picture: no special effects, no stunt casting, no edgy hip-hop soundtrack -- just a whip-smart script and a bunch of great actors doing that weird thing actors are supposed to do but never quite manage. What's it called? Oh yes, acting.

Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern play Jack and Terry Linden, two bored, thirty-something middle-class marrieds. Jack's an English professor at the local university, where he works with his best friend, Hank (Peter Krause), whose wife Edith (Naomi Watts) he's secretly schtupping between classes. Hank, meanwhile, reacts to his cuckolding with amused indifference, more traumatized by his writer's block than anything: at one point, he grills his unpublished manuscript on the backyard barbecue, then sells a poem about the incident to The New Yorker.

The New Yorker namedrop seems apt here: we've seen this sort of adulterous academics escapade countless times before -- and we've certainly read it before, in Updike, in Bellow and in the magazine itself. What distinguishes We Don't Live Here Anymore is the craft and sensitivity with which director John Curran approaches these well-worn clichés. His direction is almost touchingly boring in its realism, single-mindedly focusing on the mood swings and cover-ups of his central four characters at the expense of any grandstanding gimmickry.

In the hands of a Bob Rafelson or Alan Ball, this would have been a misogynist bluster, or just another predictable jibe at suburban mores, but Curran gives each of his characters the benefit of the doubt, which pays dividends during the movie's emotionally messy conclusion. The cast is also excellent: Dern gets her best role since 1996's Citizen Ruth, while Ruffalo, Watts and Krause give fully rounded performances.

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