Dave suspects his wife is having an affair but won’t ask her directly, because if she says yes, “then we’ll have to do something about it” (a mentality I’m all too familiar with). Scott plays him well, with a quietly tortured tension that comes so close to erupting at times that I braced myself for the blow. Though Davis is fine as Dana, she's not a very sympathetic character; we get no real idea of why she might be cheating on kind, decent Dave. There’s a hint that she feels a little unappreciated (her family ignores her when she starts singing at the breakfast table – frankly, I wouldn’t exactly be encouraging caterwauling at 8 a.m. either, if I were at that table), but it seems pretty minor. She doesn’t even particularly try to conceal her affair, “running out for milk” at breakfast and coming back after lunch (then again, I, too, would find excuses to get out of that house with its squalling, bratty kids). I get annoyed at movies like this one and A Walk on the Moon that portray women as so fickle or so susceptible to seduction that they’ll cheat on a good, loving man with nary a scruple.
This is definitely not the movie to see if your relationship is at all in trouble. Even if you're single, it's distressing -- Dentists does all too good a job of showing how you can suddenly open your eyes one day and realize that the person you love is betraying you, yet you're too scared to act. Makes you not too eager to hitch up.
However, cinematically speaking, it's a good movie.
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