'Fire' lacks any genuine spark

Little originality or inventiveness in single-minded film

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

October 19, 2007

(C) Sometimes a foreign director wins the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, swiftly gets a shot at big-time American moviemaking - and reveals himself or herself to be a modest talent when the work is stripped of subtitles. That's the case with Rendition's Gavin Hood (the South African Oscar-winner for Tsotsi) and also the Danish writer-director Susanne Bier. She has followed the American art house successes of Open Hearts (2002) and her Oscar-nominated After the Wedding (2006) with Things We Lost in the Fire, the tale of a recent widow, Audrey Burke (Halle Berry), and a drug addict, Jerry Sunborne (Benicio Del Toro), who was her husband's oldest and best friend.

Although Bier has been a member of the austere, avant-garde movement known as Dogme 95 - and still uses a handheld-camera here - I've always thought her movies raised one question: What happens to a soap opera when you blow the suds away and take out the rhythms and the melodies? Are you left with unvarnished truth or a more ascetic soap opera?

Things We Lost in the Fire is indisputably the latter. With a script by Allan Loeb, it uses a time-hopping format and a plotline based on social extremes to put a new face on the old story of two injured people nudging each other toward recovery. Less an emotional whirligig than a long, slow monorail ride, it grows more conventional and single-minded as it goes along.

It's initially intriguing that Burke's late husband, Steven (David Duchovny), some kind of real-estate wizard in the Pacific Northwest, would have had a close relationship with a down-and-outer like Sunborne. But it turns out that Sunborne is a former lawyer who retains enough of his brains and faculties to win a real-estate license with the help of a neighbor (John Carroll Lynch). That neighbor's barbs about marital life provide the film with some welcome blasts of sour wit.

But the only fresh character is another recovering addict, Kelly (Alison Lohman), who doesn't accept Sunborne's disrespect of the Serenity Prayer and shows herself a take-charge gal even at Burke's dinner table. Kelly puts no-nonsense zing into her sympathy for the emotionally walking-wounded. Otherwise, we're left to see Burke come to a halting understanding of what Sunborne offered Steven while Sunborne creates a character who is lightly, often humorously, understanding of the pressures on Burke and her 10-year-old daughter (Alexis Lewellyn) and 6-year-old son (Micah Berry, unrelated to Halle Berry).

He would be a paragon of domestic manliness were it not for that addiction thing. Sinatra earned an Oscar nomination for his astringent performance as a junkie in Otto Preminger's movie The Man With the Golden Arm. Del Toro seems to be playing The Man With the Golden Heart.

Director Bier mistakes drama for therapy, and that confusion backfires on her characters and actors. The hypnotic Berry and the deft Del Toro look ridiculous when the widow invites the addict into her bed. There's nothing sexual about it: She just wants to use his chest as a pillow so she can get to sleep (the way she did with her husband). Bier gets bad laughs with this platonic assignation - no man should ever be asked to enter Berry's bed to act as a soporific.

You can't fault Berry for her choices here. Unlike that other mesmerizing beauty, Michelle Pfeiffer, Berry as a performer appears to be highly dependent on her directors - in the six years since she gave her Oscar-winning performance in Monster's Ball, she's been most effective on the big screen as Storm in Bryan Singer's X-Men movies. In Things We Lost in the Fire, she gives Bier everything she wants, but all this filmmaker usually wants (to borrow one of her hit titles) is an open heart. The imaginative ingredients of acting get swallowed up in gushers of sympathy. Despite all the skill on display in the picture, only Lohman delivers originality and the unexpected.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

>>>Things We Lost in the Fire (Paramount) Starring Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro. Directed by Susanne Bier. Rated R. Time 113 minutes.