By This is our final article on DIFF this year. Related stories are here and here.
As the festival wound down, I found myself needing an injection of Hollywood, and Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” was the ticket. Well, maybe. Susanne Bier is actually Danish, and this movie is somewhat unconventional. I’m not sure if it’s going to get a wide release in the Middle East, but I’m not holding my breath.
The one consistently terrific thing about this film is Benicio Del Toro and his brand of awesome. I’m not exactly sure how he manages to take the familiar role of a recovering heroin addict and transform it into something this charming and unpretentious, but I like to think it has something to do with being charming and unpretentious in real life. Either way, this is one performance any self-respecting Del Toro fangirl or fanboy cannot possibly miss out on, no matter where you are.
The rest of the movie oscillates between genuinely grounded, thoughtful material and occasionally coma-inducing melodrama. Halle Berry’s turn as shell-shocked widow Audrey is solid, but her obligatory moment of meltdown and surrender felt as thought it could have come off a check-list. While Del Toro’s heroin withdrawal scene has similar overtones, his inventive facial contortions alone create something original to watch.
David Duchovny, the dead husband who is the link between Berry and Del Toro’s characters, has some potential, but he disappears halfway into the film. The story is fragmented (much like a grieving person’s mind – which I thought to be a nice touch overall), and Duchovny’s character is seen in flashbacks. But the flashbacks just stop all of a sudden, and the film is the poorer for it. We understand that Brian was a righteous dude unjustly taken from his family in the prime of his life, but aside from the great dynamic he has with his drug addict friend, we don’t really get to know him as a human being.
The deadpan John Carroll Lynch is a source of comic relief as a weird but good-natured neighbor, but it’s a bad sign when you realize his character is actually more likeable than Brian’s.
Bier is drawing a fascinating parallel between addiction and grief however, and she does succeed in raising serious questions about the way human beings deal with both phenomena. Grief is seen as more “respectable,” but in modern-day life there also seems to be very little in the way of social tradition in regards to dealing with it (Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking has made the claim that today’s Americans see grief almost solely in terms of “moving on,” rarely addressing its actual dark nature). Audrey understands that Brian’s hapless friend Jerry needs rehab, for example, but Jerry in turn sees that Audrey is in a similar position. The old saying – “it takes one to know one” – certainly applies here.
Bier and the screenwriter, Allan Loeb, also have a handle on life’s cruel little sense of irony: Audrey worries that her husband might get shot while visiting his junkie pal in a neighbourhood that seems composed solely of other junkies, but tragedy comes at her sideways. Brian is killed, but not while slumming it with various “unfortunates,” far from it, in fact.
I do take issue with the fact that too many films that closely explore human emotion take place in opulent households. I understand that a bleak storyline can be offset by a gorgeous background to startling effect, but come on, poor people grieve too – and their lives are not devoid of beauty either. Beauty, after all, is more than a stately home full of expensive doodads.
