By Mary F. Pols, STAFF WRITER
IT'S THAT SEASON when Hollywood would like our spirits to fall along with the foliage. The industry's intentions aren't cruel; it's just that their hopes for the awards season tend to soar in direct correlation to how much audiences weep. This week alone presents audiences with multiple bleak-fests involving dead or missing children ("Gone Baby Gone" and "Reservation Road") and dead or missing spouses ("Rendition" and "Things We Lost in the Fire").
For those of us who appreciate an autumnal yank at the heartstrings, Danish director Susanne Bier's "Things We Lost in the Fire" certainly sounds like a winner. A mother of two, Audrey (Halle Berry) unexpectedly finds herself a widow. In her grief, she forges a complicated bond with Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a drug addict who was her dead husband's best friend.
Audrey has long been jealous of the time and energy her husband Brian (David Duchovny) expended on Jerry. But out of her desire to know her lost spouse better, she impulsively invites Jerry to move into her garage. Our anticipation is that he will help her recover as she helps him recover and that Oscar nominations will be deserved all around.
Bier, renowned for intimate dramas such as "Brothers" and "After the Wedding," makes her English-language debut here, and her usual unerring sense of emotional truth has been inexplicably lost in translation. With the exception of Del Toro, who is both authentic and magnetic, the movie leaves the impression of surfaces, of houses too beautiful to be lived in, a marriage too perfect to be believed and a grief so glamorous it alienates rather than endears.
The narrative is fractured between life with Brian and without him. Since in loss we are always cast back into memories, reliving moments we had together, this device for illustrating the nature of grief makes perfect sense. So, too, does the notion that both best friend and wife would glorify him in his absence.
But the view we get of Brian is too limited. He's so decent that we start to think he's truly too good for this Earth. He's a great provider who has long since paid off the mortgage on their airy Northwestern home (oh, the tasteful modernity of this place!) and a tender father to 10-year-old Harper (the adorable Alexis Llewellyn) and 6-year-old Dory (Micah Berry, even cuter). He goes jogging every morning with the otherwise friendless neighbor (the scene-stealing John Carroll Lynch).
As for how he is as a husband, it's clear from the way he slips his hand down Audrey's jeans that he knows how to treat his woman. And he's selfless, tearing himself away to check on Jerry in his seedy squat on the wrong side of the tracks. Brian treats Jerry with respect, doesn't judge and leaves behind bags of groceries. We start to want this paragon gone so that we can get back to the more titillating prospect of a relationship between Audrey and Jerry.
Unfortunately, we're stymied there as well, mostly by Berry's performance. Bier's camera constantly, distractingly, zooms into those exquisite eyes of hers, but we never feel admitted to Audrey's heart. Berry is best at being hostile — "It should have been you," she tells Jerry — but the net result is, we start to think Audrey is not only small as a person but rather mean.
Her character never seems to have done any thinking off-camera. When Jerry enters her kitchen to talk, she's just sitting at her table, cup of coffee in front of her, looking as though her primary function is to wait for the scene to begin.
There's a predictable staginess to the performance; we know exactly when and where Audrey will have the kind of breakdown that involves throwing things.
That's not to say she's awful. But winning an Oscar (for "Monster's Ball") tends to shed a very bright light on future performances, and this one feels too studied to be true.
That might not be the case if Berry weren't up against Del Toro, a naturalistic actor who goes beyond the parameters of a character as written and creates a being of his own.
When Berry is on camera, you admire how she looks in the surroundings. When Del Toro' on camera, you're aware of him, not the space around him.
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