Marital stress

We Don’t Live Here Anymore is very faithfully adapted from a couple of Andre Dubus novellas I read a long time ago. Quite how long ago I didn’t realise until the point in the movie when Hank, a failed writer teaching literature at some small-town New England college, gets yet another rejection letter and ceremonially burns his manuscript in the backyard barbecue as the bemused kids look on.

What’s wrong with this scene? Well, just ten minutes earlier, we’d seen him writing…on a laptop. So there is no ‘manuscript’. It’s on a computer, and probably backed up on CD or some such. But Dubus wrote the original story in the Seventies, and that’s when Larry Gross wrote his screenplay, too — perhaps on a Smith Corona, perhaps he burnt his first draft, too. But after taking a quarter-century to get his script on to the screen, the ceremonial torching seems a hollow gesture — like someone playing at being a rejected author rather than being one.