Things We Lost In The Fire

Films about hard drug addiction almost by definition require a uncompromising treatment. So when Things We Lost In The Fire opens with a scene with David Duchovny and a beautifully-ringleted Afro-American child exchanging some wincingly cute, moralistically-pointed dialogue poolside, you know things are not looking good.  Unfortunately they don't get any better.

Halle Berry plays Audrey who is married to nice guy and wealthy property developer, Brian (Duchovny). He happens to be best friends with Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a smack addict. When Brian is killed Audrey invites Jerry to come and stay with her and her two kids (Alexis Llewellyn and Micah Berry, the latter apparently no relation to Halle), but the extremely fraught emotional climate makes for complications between all four.

Allan Loeb’s screenplay explores this material with some credibility and Berry, who won an Oscar for Monster’s Ball in 2001 and then went into a career free-fall, hitting rock-bottom with Catwoman in 2005, is quite effective as the grieving wife, as is Del Toro as her drug-dependent house guest . But Danish director Bier making her first English language film delivers something so glossily sanitized with mainstream studio production values (Sam “American Beauty” Mendes was producer) as to undermine any genuine investment in the characters and their relationships and result is only a notch or two above TV  “Movie Of The Week” calibre. With Bier at the helm (her previous film After The Wedding, 2006, had been a Best Foreign Film nominee) clearly something, somewhere went wrong.

 

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