*** (out of ****)
Starring Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, Ron Eldard, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jonathan Ahdout, Kim Dickens, Carlos Gomez, and Frances Fisher
Directed by Vadim Perelman & written by Vadim Perelman and Shawn Lawrence Otto, from the novel by Andre Dubus III
2003
125 min R
My day job requires that I pay for liability insurance once a year. I get letters from the insurance people every now and then, reminding me to send them money. So, this year after I paid, I kept getting renewal notices. I called the appropriate people, who told me that, yes, my payment had been received. When the renewal notices kept coming, I called those people again, and they said to just ignore the letters. Warily I obeyed. I haven’t been fired yet.
“House of Sand and Fog” begins as the story of a woman who suffers just such a bureaucratic snafu, except the result is that she’s evicted from her house. This is the same house where she grew up and which her late father spent 30 years paying off. As if that’s not bad enough, her husband ran off eight months ago, her job sucks, and her mother only calls to tell her she’s a loser by talking about how great her brother is. The woman (Jennifer Connelly) is, well, not exactly a winner, and soon finds herself living in her car, writing bad checks, and cussin’ up a storm every time her cheap lawyer doesn’t have good news for her.
But the movie also belongs to a shady former colonel in the Iranian army (Ben Kingsley). After the ayatollahs booted out the shah, the colonel and his family fled to America, where they have been living a posh life they cannot afford while the once proud colonel is reduced to working construction by day and jockeying cash registers by night. For a song he buys up Connelly’s house at a county auction and, after some renovations, plans to sell it for four times what he paid. This is an investment property, he tells his son-in-law with some embarrassment, and it will help pay for his teenage son’s college education. He and his family cannot afford to simply give back the house for what they paid, or they would be living out of a car instead of Connelly.
At this point “House of Sand and Fog” requires a kind of sizeable suspension of disbelief (or is it suspension of belief? I can never get them straight). Neither Kingsley nor Connelly is at fault for this situation, but the movie contrives to have them at odds with one another. What they should do is join forces and sue the crap out of the county, so that Kingsley can get the market value for the house and Connelly can go back to living in it, for free, just like before. What’s required of the audience is similar to a spaceship or time machine in a science-fiction movie: we know it doesn’t really work, but we have to run with it anyway. “House of Sand and Fog” is more about the Meaning than about narrative logic. It is a movie about making and maintaining a family, and nothing is more symbolic of a family than a house.
So, anyway, into this already simmering quagmire steps the very deputy (Ron Eldard) who evicted Connelly, and who now wants to help her. He’s a married father of two, but early on we detect a little bit of a sizzle between the strong man with the gun and the helpless woman screwed by the system. From these three characters, as well as the colonel’s wife and son (Shohreh Aghdashloo and Jonathan Ahdout), we can get some idea what the movie is really about, which has something to do with the pursuit of a perfect family. Connelly’s character seems, as politically incorrect as it sounds, best suited to be a wife and mother. She works as a housekeeper and has no other professional skills. Her husband left her because she wanted children and he did not, and in her pit of despair she cries out for her daddy.
Like many home wreckers, she is attracted to the deputy because he is a responsible family man, a good provider, and kind to his children. The fact that he is staying with his wife more out of duty than love only excites her more. There’s something so heartbreaking about watching her play house after they’ve shacked up in a run-down cabin belonging to a friend of his. It’s no secret that men are looking for women like their mothers and women are looking for men like their fathers. After months on the wagon, she starts drinking around the deputy, possibly because she wants a strong male and/or parental presence to tell her when she’s had enough. A parent/mate putting his foot down can be a very comforting thing. Kingsley’s colonel is also trying to live up to his definition of family, and Connelly, in a strange way, finds herself admiring him because he is a passionate, if not completely successful, family man.
The movie, from first time Russian-born director Vadim Perelman, is far from flawless, and impeded by three major stumbling blocks. The first is, of course, the premise itself, which requires that the characters handle things so badly. The real estate issues are not so much unrealistic as just kind of annoying. The second problem is that the movie is overwrought and overblown—all the slow motion, squealing string parts, whirling camera movements, ominous this and ominous that. “House” is not unlike last year’s “The Hours,” which my wife and I, as much as we liked it, have made into the butt of so many jokes because it has become synonymous with heavy-handed solemnity.
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