Marital disillusionment is an easy topic for any medium. Fleetwood Mac made nearly a whole career out of it — goodbye, sanity! Though the resulting songs of sexual and romantic torment and betrayal rocked, and rocked hard. It’s a gradual progression of jilt, remiss without mentioning Ang Lee’s 1997 take on 1970s connubial ennui, “The Ice Storm.”

Adapted from his own play, screenwriter Eugene O’Brien’s 2008 film “Eden” attempts to take from the stage a modern, Irish, suburban take on the ol’ chestnut of “I’m tired with the person I share my bed and bathroom sink with, and it’s too late to do anything about it, but boy wouldn’t I like to boink that random, fresh-faced cutie at the bar.”

I bet on stage, this production has the power to slap you in the face. The movie, though, falls flat, flatter than a keg of Budweiser would at the main character’s suburban pub haunt.

The story, of Billy, a balding telephone repairman (he’s still fit, but instead of just shaving his ginger wisps of cotton candy off like a man, he maintains one in the middle, like some Lollipop Guild member in a blue jumpsuit) and Breda, the wife whose full time job is dieting, is compelling enough. Who doesn’t know — or isn’t, themselves — a couple like that? And who doesn’t long to slap some sense in them, say, “Look, once you break up, we’re all going to tell you we knew it was doomed from the start.” Their children are background. One day

they’ll talk about how they had to raise themselves. Their parents will look at family pictures from the kids’ childhood and see misery in their tight grins.

Billy’s friends haunt the pub, with trendy facial hair, trying to pick up young girls only slightly less pitifully than such an endeavor would be in Homer Simpson’s haunt, Moe’s. Breda’s friends are either part of her dieting club or ready to scamper off to abandoned factories with a bottle of rosé, dressed like the trendily middle aged

actresses in commercials for menopause medicine.

Those sad but real characters could be enough. But the audience just isn’t shown — in the same way a play would — the depth of heir relationships with each other. On stage, they’d be stuck with each other until a scene break. The actors could just sit there and be stared at as they squirmed and said penetrating things. You could look at Billy as his eyes drifted to the young girl with her baby fat cheeks at the pub. You could see him toss back a heavy swallow, in guilt or for courage. You could see Breda stumble out into the cobblestones the night of the couple’s 10-year anniversary without some quick cut elsewhere. And you probably wouldn’t have to watch the needless scenes of her lonely self lighting candles in a gigantic tub and dipping her hand meaningfully below the bubble bath.

Freed from the conventions of stage, and that simmering time — for the audience to become so acquainted with the characters you’d notice if they changed socks — the movie flits about and never settles on the things it needs to. It’s more distracted with doing things like digitally inserting lens flares in post production (making it look like some horizontal purple sunbeam just happens to be filtering into their suburban homes or local pubs) than expanding on why Breda has just lashed out against a diet club member at some kind of china teacup social. It would rather take us on a hike up a beautiful, Celtic cross studded hillside with Billy and his boys rather than imply the same while explaining, through dialog, their need for the “Trainspotting”-esque country excursion.

“Eden” is “The Ice Storm” without the sound and fury, the kids playing doctor and the adults playing key party. It’s Fleetwood Mac without the exploding juvenile sexual frustration. Added to that, the family has no other troubles than the proverbial seven-year itch. Their house is spotless, their children quiet, his job secure and enough to provide for the family — not much to sniff at these days. Despite Billy’s amber pints and swigs from the whiskey bottle and Breda’s (200 calorie!) glasses of peach-colored wine, they’re not even unhappy enough to dive full in. How can this supposed shackling misery warrant a movie when it isn’t enough to warrant a hangover?

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.