Early on it is easy to think of Things We Lost In the Fire as potentially edgy material. It has strong cinematography, non-linear storytelling and an offbeat performance from Benicio Del Toro. Sadly that stuff is a cover that can only mask material best suited for a Lifetime channel movie for so long.
The movie is about the charming Burke family. Steve (David Duchovny) and Audrey (Halle Berry) are the perfect couple, raising perfect kids Harper (Alexis Llewellyn) and Dory (Micah Berry). They live in one of those aggressively charming houses with way too many windows and funky architecture that only seem to exist in movies. But wait, all is not perfect. Steve's best friend Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) is a heroin addict and Steve is much too loyal to ever consider giving up on him. See? He's not perfect. He cares too much for people. And that proves his undoing, as Steve gets shot trying to intervene in a domestic violence case to keep a woman from getting beaten.
Despite always resenting Jerry when Steve was alive, Audrey goes to see him and eventually invites him to take an unused room in their home. She's trying to follow through with Steve's attempts to help his friend, against her better wisdom. The rest of the movie watches as these two try find themselves again after having an important part of their lives ripped away.
There is certainly some interesting material to explore here. Drug addiction is enough for any one movie but this one adds loss and a search for self to the mix. The problem with the movie is that the script scratches only skin deep. The plot points are painfully predictable and unengaging. The script is generic stuff, exploring no new ground and not making any attempt to do so.
The first half of the movie has all the earmarks of a talented director trying to rework the material into something more. Susanne Bier is clearly in love with strong imagery. She liberally uses extreme close ups of faces as insert shots. Odd camera angles like looking straight down at the spout of a kettle as it starts to pour coffee are common place here. The lighting is unnatural with lots of strong edge lights and blown out highlights. And when funky camera angles aren't being used, hand held camera work is. The cumulative effect of all this is to distract heavily from the light weight material.
Similarly distracting is Benicio Del Toro, who gets a rare chance to flash his considerable charms. He makes Jerry funny and loveable in spite of his debilitating addiction. Del Toro almost always works with dark roles, and this is no exception, but here he gets to have some fun with it. It's such a good performance that it becomes easy to not notice the rest of the movie, which is not a bad thing. I do admit considerable disappointment with one scene where Audrey asks him to describe being on heroin. Del Toro does a nice job with this leading to his description of the dread that becomes part of the addiction. But as he seems to be searching for the words, I was reminded of his turn in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so what I really wanted him to say was "I'm getting the fear!" This may be the moment I noticed that the movie was plunging into shameless sentimentality.
The movie runs too long by 10-15 minutes, over staying its welcome. Once it runs out of things to hide behind, it should sprint to the finish and get out before we have time to recognize what went wrong. Instead it just wallows in the drippy sentiment, shamelessly trying to jerk tear after tear out of the audience. This obviously works for some people as the woman next to me in the theater was sobbing by the end. I was just rolling my eyes.
It was nice to see Halle Berry trying some difficult acting again. Since winning the Oscar for Monster's Ball, she hasn't really challenged herself, instead collecting on the prestige of the award. She can't match Del Toro but neither does she try too, instead playing her role steadfastly despite what scene stealing antics he's up to. I also very much liked John Carroll Lynch as Steve's brother. He brought a good laugh to every scene he was in.
Unless you find yourself attracted to shamelessly sentimental films, you can probably safely skip this movie. Story wise it has nothing of interest and the better parts of the film aren't enough to actually recommend it. But if it comes on cable at some point, feel free to watch the first hour or so before moving on.
- John Shea
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