Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Good movie but grossly overrated

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

A married couple, both having extramarital affairs, so what's new? Nothing! The couple actually seem quite compatible and happy and successful and care for each other and as mundane normal as film can make a person. So they both have affairs, get caught and end up with their new love interests. Really boring to the point of ff through much of it. You would think the producers would have at least injected actual nudity and sex, but about all you get is some weak sound effects and lots of people sleeping in their night time clothing. Most put to sleepy of all was the droning music background that seemed limited to one instrument within a limited frequency range. Music for people committed to an institution to sedate them. A small twist at the end dealing with are now separated couple having an affair with guess who that was artificial and not at all believable - just stupid.

A middle age couple are in the throes of an affair. Both of them.The subtleties of a middle age relationship will be wasted on the young. Having read the negative reviews here, there's no doubting the reviewer's age. They've completely missed the point. That's fine. It's not for them. I may have felt the same way, once.For everyone else, this is subtle, poignant, witty, truthful and very funny. It takes you to places you expect, in a natural but charming way and then surprises you. It's a very delicate balance, pulled off beautifully by writer and director. And what a superb cast. All four of the main parts are played to perfection. These are no hacks. A top notch class act. The Lovers is a wonderfully fresh film for a mature audience. About time.

At a key juncture in the film "The Lovers," the character of Mary played by Debra Winger exclaims, "We're messed up, but we're not bad people." At least one character in the film, Joel, who is the son Mary and her husband Michael (Tracy Letts), punches a hole in the wall in the family home and turns into a bull in a china stop because he genuinely feels that his parents are bad people.The DVD format of "The Lovers" includes a lengthy bonus segment entitled "A Complicated Passion--Making the Lovers." Writer-director Azazel Jacobs explains that the film "came out of a strange period of my life." In his attempt to devise an autobiographical film, Jacobs saw the family home as a kind of theatre with the characters self-consciously "putting on an act." Indeed, the film has the feel of a work of theatre in primarily a four-character play. The dramatic tension is built between a husband and wife who are both having affairs and contemplating ending their marriage. Much of the dialogue is sentimental, anticipating a reconciliation of Mary and Michael. The two lovers of the married couple, a ballet instructor and a strange man who appears to be a wannabe actor, both approach the respective husband and wife at one point, warning about the impending break-up. It was in those disturbing moments that the film began to get truly ugly.A major problem with this film was whether this was a romantic comedy, a dark-edged drama, or a domestic tragedy. Actress Debra Winger offered a pinpoint analysis in the bonus segment when she confessed that "chaos is so overwhelming." While the film was successful in delivering the chaos of a middle-aged couple's troubled marriage, it was also a stylistic jumble as a slow-paced and rather depressing slice of life.

Being of the older generation, I thought I would like this film more than I did.Debra Winger and Tracy Letts are a married couple with each having an affair and continually postponing telling the other that they're leaving. Thus, they're also stringing along their lovers being unable to fully commit one way or the other. Somehow, this rekindles Winger and Letts' passion for each other sexually.The movie is very slow-paced, has many awkward moments, but it does contain some deadpan humor that works at times. The film's characters are mostly unlikable and thus I was never really able to invest emotionally in them or really care what happened to them in the end.Overall, a disappointment to me.