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You can't count on him By Dennis Harvey MARK RUFFALO HAS built his career on characters – one character, really – that define a particular emerging personality type. In previous eras, it might've been called the cad or the scoundrel, but those blunt terms imply more deliberate moral error than is applicable today. You know the guy, especially if you've dated him: slippery, sexy, appealingly inarticulate most of the time, charming in a guileless way (or so it seems). Easily liked by all, he awakens the protective instinct and is the best boyfriend in the world – at first. Then occasional moodiness turns into increasing remoteness, until he exits the relationship in a manner that makes it looks like it's your decision. Yet this troublemaker – usually middle-class and college-educated, with no more than minor cause for angst in his past – is as frustrated as those he frustrates, because he doesn't know what he wants and can't (or won't) figure it out. The classic slacker passivity that worked as a behavioral vocabulary from adolescence onward begins to fray once others become grown-ups en masse. Come 30 o'clock, not everybody can be a musician or a sponsored X sportster or major in going back to school. Ruffalo introduced his man-boy persona in Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me. As Terry, he was spineless, ingratiating, irresponsible, good-hearted, childish, and a hapless agent of chaos – exactly the unmanageable problem to trip triggers in control-freak sister Sam (Laura Linney). If Sam ultimately came off more the villain (though some viewers disagree), no one could deny quintessentially charming fuck-up Terry had forced her hand. Ever so passively, of course. Last year, in Austin Chick's excellent XX/YY, Ruffalo was again the well-intentioned weasel, this time playing Hacky Sack with three women's emotions as the sole character to remain just as indecisive in alleged adulthood as he was in sophomore year. Completing an unofficial trilogy – with Ruffalo now pushing 40, you wonder how many more man-boys he still has in him – is We Don't Live Here Anymore, yet another Sundance prizewinner about unsatisfied twenty-to-thirtysomethings. It's a sort of updated Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, filtered though the more naturalistically diffuse sensibility of Andre Dubus, who wrote the two mid-'70s novellas adapted by scenarist Larry Gross. Jack (Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause) are liberal arts professors living in a small, pretty university town. They've been friends – as well as friendly competitors – for a long time, and in an inevitable way, their rather dissimilar wives have become confidantes as well. But the households are very different. Terry (Laura Dern) is an emotionally generous, organizationally clueless homemaker and mother to two children with Jack. A certain genial confusion with interludes of drunken hysteria seems her natural pattern, though Jack often resents putting up with the drama. By contrast, Edith (Naomi Watts) is as coldly controlled as her interior decor, which seems designed to intrude as little as possible on the concentration and philandering Hank requires to remain a successful author-academic. During an inebriated house party for four, half the attendees go on a beer run, while the other half find their inhibitions lowered enough to lock lips. This minor incident is enough to cast a light on incestuous infidelities, lies, and marital doubts that force everyone to acknowledge just how much hypocrisy they'll accept to maintain the status quo. Cynical Hank thinks marriage is the presentation of a mutual front. Terry fervently needs to believe in conventional fidelity and trust. Edith just needs something to cut through her numbness, however briefly – the riskier, the better. And Jack (surprise!) just doesn't know what he wants. Or rather, he can't choose between various options that cancel each other out. As juicy as a soap opera, occasionally witty, and sober enough to rest comfortably on the art-house screen, We Don't Live Here Anymore is so tightly constructed that you can forgive the bits that come off as pretentious or psychologically faulty. It's not a great movie, but like You Can Count on Me and XX/YY, it gets far on recognizable human behavior. Officially this is an ensemble piece, but somehow Ruffalo again emerges as the focal point. In part that's because the competent but overrated Watts makes Edith a one-note ice princess, while Krause's role is the least developed and Dern can't help bringing her specialty edge-of-white-trash hysteria to bear on otherwise sotto voce proceedings. These are all good performances within their limits, but the limits to Ruffalo's fully realized Jack are the character's own key personality traits. I'm not sure if an actor has ever made weakness and ambivalence such a trademark without also being primarily comic, villainous, a tragedian, or just a reliable supporting player. Ruffalo is the leading man as unreliable everyguy. Put him in other, more conventional roles – the tough cops of In the Cut and Collateral – and he becomes rather anonymous, as well as unconvincing. Spinelessness becomes him. 'We Don't Live Here Anymore' opens Fri/20, Embarcadero Center Cinema, 1 Embarcadero Center, promenade level, Battery at Clay, S.F. (415) 267-4893; Piedmont Theatre, 4186 Piedmont, Oakl. (510) 464-5980; Albany Twin, 1115 Solano, Albany. (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.
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