Dentist David Hurst (Campbell Scott) rushes backstage at a local theater to give his dentist wife Dana (Hope Davis) — the mother of their three children — something she's forgotten. She's rehearsing an opera with an amateur group. David sees her as the camera does, through a partially opened door. She is talking to a man, we don't know who, with his back to us. But her face glows with sensuality and longing. At that moment, David's life unravels.

It's a great quicksilver scene — comic, passionate and devastating — one of many in this remarkable film. Working from the pungent script Craig Lucas has crafted from Jane Smiley's novel The Age of Grief, Alan Rudolph (Choose Me) does his best work in years. Is Dana really having an affair? Are David's imaginary conversations with a woman-bashing patient (Denis Leary at his feistiest) a prelude to his own violence? The film handles the hard realities of family life — the scene when all the Hursts get the flu is nightmarish farce — without losing its shimmering mystery. Scott and Davis could not be better. You're in for something special.

“(We're Not) The Jet Set”

George Jones and Tammy Wynette were still married when they recorded the tongue-in-cheek "(We're Not) The Jet Set." The lyrics, written by Nashville songwriter Bobby Braddock, who also penned Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today," make fun of the good life by declaring, "We're not the Jet Set/We're the old Chevrolet set." Braddock recalled that while writing the song, he needed the name of a city that evened out the rhyme he had with "Riviera" and "Missourah." “I got out a Rand McNally atlas," he said. "In the first part are the maps. The last part is an alphabetical listing of cities. I wanted a rustic, small-time sound. I went to the listing for Missouri. And I found 'Festus.' I loved the sound of it."