It's like watching a film of your parents as a young couple circa 1970, floundering in a maelstrom of their own adulterous passion, deceit and the entrails of a love that, at some point, quietly, discreetly morphed into disdain or disgust or vacuity. This is the premise of We Don't Live Here Anymore, the new film by John Curran starring indie heartthrob Mark Ruffalo (13 Going on 30), Laura Dern (I Am Sam), Naomi Watts (The Ring) and Six Feet Under's Peter Krauss.

Just as 1998's Academy Award-Winning In The Bedroom, the film is an adaptation of the short stories and novellas of Andre Dubus. Mostly written in the '70s, the stories have an eerie, honest feel of the epoch to them that translates well in the film. In the dark interior of a wooden house, Laura Dern's character starts drinking wine in the afternoon, avoiding housekeeping tasks while her husband makes love with the wife of his best friend.

Later that night they will yell at each other; the eyelids of their children will flutter as accusations and insinuations, attempts and embittered rejections echo through the dirty house that figures as Everyman's dirty house. In the game of interpersonal degradation that is commonly labeled marriage, or even in life, resides a universality poetically conveyed in the film.

Hesitant to say it as I am, it is this type of emotional scenery combined with the powerful acting of its characters (especially Ruffalo and Dern) that makes me believe the film is actually stronger as a whole than the stories upon which it was based. There is a subtlety and quiet resignation that is more tasteful in the film, able to make physical what seems contrived when stated. In the novella Adultery, Watts' character voices a resignation to a life that seems to be disintegrating in the banal actions of everyday. The film converts the physicality of life's chores into the insinuations of relationships soured or unmasked, "Now, glancing at Hank reading, she took clothes from the laundry basket at her feet and folded them on the couch, and the folding of a warm towel was a manifestation of her deceit." Some of the details attenuated in the stories lose their wholeness in the film; Peter Krauss's character is a little dry and under-developed and yet the stories and the film are colored by the same subtle verisimilitude.

The passion in the film is pretty intense (boning your best friend's wife against the wall of his hallway as he sleeps upstairs), as are most of the fights-because if you think relationships can be tainted or emotions confounded-try throwing children into the mix, both as weapons and the only thing still holding people together. And it's here, like watching your parents have a bad fight, that suddenly everyone seems younger, real, and jarringly similar to yourself; you can hear your own weaknesses and attempts at defenses outing themselves harshly into cold and drunken nights. It's the flipside to most sugared-over Hollywood representations of relationships; to know another's idiosyncrasies is also to know how to hurt them most acutely.

I may have a weakness for films with the literary at heart (i.e. The Wonderboys), but to me this tackles literary-ness in an entirely novel way. As if to say we are only as complete as the emotions we can either speak or convey; then film, as life, is an ideal amalgamation of emotions forced into the realm of language combined with the physicality of our lives. And adultery has never looked so romantic.