The marriage between a former ballet dancer and a philosophy professor falls apart under the stifling weight of artistic and intellectual ambition.

SYNOPSIS:

When they meet at a college party, Sarah and William are instantly drawn to one another. Sarah is a promising ballet dancer who seems destined for a professional career, while William is a stand-out philosophy student fixated on the transcendent power of thinking. Both painfully ambitious, they’re certain that together they can avoid the same suburban hopelessness that left their own parents embittered and full of regret.

We jump ahead several years in their relationship. Plagued by injuries, Sarah has retired from dancing while William works to establish his career as a philosophy professor. Now married and with their young children in tow, they move frequently for William's adjunct teaching jobs. Stripped of her identity as a dancer, Sarah struggles with clinical depression and motherhood—desperately trying to make sense of who she is without ballet, and dogged by the persistent feeling of having not lived-up to her early promise as a dancer.

When William obtains a tenure-track professorship in Chicago, Sarah's depression starts to recede. Secure that she and William will finally remain in one place for an extended period, Sarah settles into motherhood and teaching dance. For William though, the stability feels deadening and his hard-won achievements vacuous. Where once he’d dreamed of pushing against the very limits of what a human being can think, as William approaches forty, he instead finds himself publishing articles in journals no one reads and teaching the same courses year after year to disinterested students.

With the sense of having traded the transformative power of thinking for children and departmental bureaucracy, William begins to blame Sarah's newfound suburban contentment for his sense of failure. Desperate to infuse his life with the same transcendent intensity that he once felt from great art and philosophy, William has an affair with a precocious graduate student—Meghan—who assures him that once he is unmoored from his petty domestic responsibilities, he won't merely write about great thinkers, but occupy their same rarified intellectual space.

However, just as quickly as they began, Meghan and William's mutual projections of one another recede as they both come to realize the impossibility of actually living in the romanticized space that they’ve pined after. As the affair falls apart, Sarah learns of William's betrayal—setting in motion the events which end William's life in a car accident.