JACK & TERRY & HANK & EDITH INFIDELITY GETS PERSONAL FOR THE CHARACTERS - AND ACTORS WHO PLAY THEM - IN `WE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Modern media may have reduced it to tabloid fodder and the stuff of voyeuristic reality TV. But from King David and ``The Iliad,'' through the darkest imaginings of Hamlet and Othello, up to the misad Bovary, Anna Karenina and beyond, adultery has been one of the great subjects of serious literature.

The new movie ``We Don't Live Here Anymore'' indicates that it still can be. Based on a pair of short stories the late Andre Dubus wrote in the 1970s, the film traces two couples' complicated infidelities with their best friends' spouses.

But while cheating is certainly central to the story and provides the low-budget, independent production's main marketing hook, like most thoughtful works involving the subject, ``We Don't'' is really about a whole lot more.

``It's so unflinchingly honest about a particular time in a marriage that's in crisis,'' says Mark Ruffalo (``In the Cut,'' ``Collateral''). He plays New England college professor Jack Linden, whose ma th money and child-rearing stresses ... and the fact that he's carrying on a secret affair with Edith Evans (``Mulholland Drive'' and ``21 Grams' '' Naomi Watt his colleague and best friend Hank (``Six Feet Under's'' Peter Krause).

To complicate matters, Hank has a roving eye, and Edith initiated the intrigue with Jack after her husband had his own French fling. Plus, frustrated novelist Hank has the hots for Terry, who suspects something's going on between her husband and Edith. Jack therefore tries to manipulate his wife into giving in to Hank's overtures.

Quite intriguing. But as Dern puts it, ``The issue of fidelity comes up as the crisis, but what we're seeing is people who've had for 10 years and still aren't listening to each other and aren't hearing each other's vulnerabilities.''

``Dubus is very specific about how the heart demands certain things,'' says screenwriter Larry Gross, who first adapted the author's title story and one called, appropriately, ``Adultery'' for the screen in the late 1970s, but could not get the film funded until another Dubus piece was made into the Oscar-nominated ``In the Bedroom'' three years ago. ``Characters want to be fulfilled and sexually happy, and at the same time they can't stand doing things that can't be evened up. Part of Jack's horrible behavior, luring Terry into having this affair with his friend, is that he's guilty. And he is longing to be off the hook, longing to be exonerated for what he's been doing and the lies he's been telling.''

When the time finally came to get the picture made, Gross and his producing partners chose an obscure American director, John Curran, who had been working in the Australian movie and advertising industries for more than a decade. This proved fortuitous for several reasons. Curran knew rising international star Watts from the Sydney film scene, and her participation in the movie helped shore up ``We Don't's'' financing.

But Curran's take on the material also convinced a waffling Ruffalo - who like Watts also took a producing credit on the film - that there was a director mature enough to honor the story's many complexi ``Well, I'm married and I have a kid,'' Curran shrugs. ``I told Larry that this was the first script I'd read that reflected the dramas that I'm aware of in my life and the people around me. It's tough and be a partner and be a good parent. That's universal - it transcends culture.

``I didn't want it to be maudlin or overly sentimental,'' the director adds. ``And like Andre and Larry, I'm interested in flawed people doing the best they can do to get by, trying to get some kind of redemption and pursuing some element of grace. My heart goes out to them.''

That nonjudgmental sympathy certainly impressed Dern. Confronted her, actually.

``When I first read the script, I had a rather chauvinistic point of view about it,'' says the often-daring actress (``Blue Velvet,'' ``Rambling Rose''), who after several high-profile engagements recently started her own family with musician Ben Harper. ``I felt, Terry's a nightmare. Jack's got this hot love affair going on. He and Edith are going at the end, or if they don't it'll be a tragedy.

``So I said, `What's your point of view on this movie, John Man-that's- directing-this-movie?'' Dern continues. ``And he was like, 'Well I see it as a love story between this married couple. And I see the love scenes with his lover as sort of cold and disconnected, and the love scenes with his wife as the warmer scenes, the ones filled with more passion.' I was like, `Where did this man come from?' I was so into the stereot t, as a film, it turns everything upside down and is willing to look at it as a really interesting question about how you make a partnership or true love last.''

For the equally iconoclastic Watts, Edith behaves so unexpectedly that she's still not quite sure what her character was thinking. And she loves the real-life feel of that mystery.

``She's the instigator of this affair,'' Watts affirms. ``But it's not consciously calculated to get her out of her marriage. It's not like that; I think she truly wants to believe that her marriage is s The actress reckons that Edith's uncertainty reflects the awful feeling one gets from even the suspicion that a partner has stray ``Well, adultery,'' muses Watts, who recently ended a relationship with fellow Aussie actor Heath Ledger. ``I've never been marri lived through it, I've been cheated on. It's horrible. And you fear it. If anyone hasn't been cheated on - that they know of - you always fear it. That's what makes this story completely human. We have this horrible fear that we're never enough. And what can we do to be enough?''

Did playing all of ``We Don't's'' emotional nuances teach anyone lessons they can apply to their own relationships?

``What it did was cement certain feelings that I had,'' says Ruffalo, who has a young son with his wife of four years, actress Sunrise Coigney. ``I think we all know that to make a relationship work, there has to be a certain amount of honesty and discourse. But that can be a very difficult thing, because you end up having to say some things to someone who you love deeply that you never wanted to say to another human being in the entire course of your life. It takes a constant sort of awareness.''

And that applies whether your spouse is faithful or not.

``What's fascinating about adultery is that you can't talk about it without talking about marriage,'' screenwriter Gross observes. ``Is marriage a contract? Is it a form of intimacy? Adultery is an inescapable part of dealing with intimacy, because whether or not two people cheat on each other physically, there are always questions of power and honesty in relationships - and of balancing the demands of intimacy with the need we all have to be our own, solitary person. You can cheat on your husband or your wife without ever sleeping with anyone else.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

In a word, adultery

What is it? A common definition is ``extramarital sex that willfully and maliciously interferes with marriage relations; often cited as grounds for divorce.''

And what is that? Some people have a narrow definition. Former President Bill Clinton didn't think that oral sex really constituted adultery, and according to Gail Sheehy in a 1995 Vanity Fair article, neither did former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who she said had had a similar-style affair.

The Bible says: ``Thou shalt not commit adultery.'' It's the seventh commandment.

Is that cut and dried? Former President Jimmy Carter took a broad view of adultery when he said in a famous 1976 interview: ``I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.''

On the Web: With that wider definition in mind, consider this. According to a 2002 Washington Post article, ``The Internet is playing an increasing role in breaking up marriages. Divorce lawyers and unhappy spouses are finding that while the Internet doesn't cause adultery, it certainly makes it easier.'' While some of these affairs never get beyond the cyberspace world, they still have been known to contribute to the ending of a marriage. A warning sign is when ``your partner spends more time with the computer than with you.''

How many people are doing it? Any effort to quantify adultery cases comes with the caveat that people tend to lie when questioned about sex; experts say men are likely to exaggerate their claims, while women diminish theirs. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in 2002 asked married women whether they had sex outside marriage, and 15 percent said yes, up from 10 percent in the same poll in 1991. Straying married men were consistent at about 22 percent in both surveys. On the other hand, the NORC says in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Americans are less tolerant of adultery. A recent poll found 80 percent said it is ``always wrong,'' up from 70 percent in 1970.

A few facts: Many Muslim nations practicing Sharia, strict Islamic law, retain the death penalty for adultery. In the U.S. military, adultery is a chargeable offense. In the original Napoleonic Code, a man could ask to be divorced from his wife if she committed adultery, but the adultery of the husband was not a sufficient motive unless he had kept his concubine in the family home.

In literature: Starting with the Bible, the story of Abraham includes several incidents that serve as warnings or stories of sin and forgiveness. In Shakespeare's ``Othello'' and ``The Winter's Tale,'' belief of adultery is central to the plots. Other famous works include James M. Cain's ``The Postman Always Rings Twice,'' Geoffrey Chaucer's ``The Canterbury Tales,'' Gustave Flaubert's ``Madame Bovary,'' Josephine Hart's ``Damage,'' Nathaniel Hawthorne's ``The Scarlet Letter,'' John Irving's ``The World According to Garp,'' Milan Kundera's ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' D.H. Lawrence's ``Lady Chatterley's Lover,'' Boris Pasternak's ``Doctor Zhivago,'' Leo Tolstoy's ``Anna Karenina,'' and Scott Turow's ``Presumed Innocent.''

At the movies: ``Unfaithful,'' ``Fatal Attraction,'' ``The Bridges of Madison County,'' ``The English Patient,'' ``The Prince of Tides'' and every film made from a novel that has adultery as a key plot point.

Parting thoughts:

``Adultery is the application of democracy to love.'' - H.L. Mencken.

``The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.'' - John Updike.

- Daily News research

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Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color -- cover) Love & Adultery

`We Don't Live Here Anymore' examines the cheating life

(3) Mark Ruffalo, left, Peter Krause, Naomi Watts and Laura Dern portray the two adulterous couples at the center of ``We Don't Live Here Anymore.''

(4) no caption (Book: The Scarlet Letter)

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In a word, Adultery (see text)