Things We Lost in the Fire

Buy This Item Things We Lost in the Fire by Dreamworks Video  Available from Amazon  $17.99  on 10-4-2008     "Dad, what does 'fluorescent' mean?" asks a winsome young Dory of his doting dad, played by David Duchovny. Pondering a moment, dad answers, "It means, 'lit from within." "So Dad, am <I>I</I> fluorescent?'" "Yes, Dory, you are." The touching, brief moment telegraphs the bond Duchovny's character, Brian, has with his family, including wife Audrey (Halle Berry) and daughter Harper (Alexis Llewellyn), and the love that radiates through and around him. When tragedy strikes early in the film, Berry and the children must acknowledge, and somehow heal, the hole left in their lives. And in that human effort, so little explored in American films, <I>Things We Lost in the Fire</I> holds a luminous candle to the hope left in life--sometimes when all that seems to be left is hope. Directed by the talented Danish director Susanne Bier (<I>Brothers</I>), <I>Fire</I> is allowed to unfold almost in real time as grief washes over the family, and Berry gives one of her most memorable performances, captured mostly in tiny details that will hit the viewer in the soul. Her eyes, the carriage of her head, her slim shoulders appearing to buckle under the weight of her sorrow--Berry is well directed here and shows that her performance in <I>Monster's Ball</I> was no fluke. As she begins to connect with Brian's childhood friend Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a new family web is woven--irregular, to be sure, but strong and comforting. Other affecting performances are given by the talented charater actor John Carroll Lynch, as Brian's friend and neighbor, and by the heartbreaking Llewellyn, an actress of stunning range for a child so young. <I>Things We Lost in the Fire</I> holds a torch in the deepest darkness, and lets souls connect--a rare gift indeed. --<I>A.T. Hurley</I> Reader Reviews The two stars of this film, Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, are really beautiful people, and if you're satisfied to just soak up beauty, this film is for you. But if you're looking for characters who are truly "fluorescent," in the sense of being lit from within - I think you'd better look elsewhere. That's because this becomes just another film that automatically attributes depth and drama to drug addiction and that then follows one recidivist user into the AA platitudes of "my drug of choice" and "one day at a time." It's perhaps no wonder that so many people are turning to drugs, because only such descent and struggle seems to lend potential cinematic significance to one's life. To be fair though, this film is about more than attempts at redeeming a drug user. It's also about coping with the death of a beloved spouse, and about what constitutes real friendship. Berry's bereaved widow character realizes that her husband's friend was more than just a leech, sucking up her husband's time and sympathy with his drug use. She realizes that Del Toro's character of Jerry contributed something very valuable to the relationship. He listened. He remembered. So when Jerry comes to his friend's funeral and subsequently moves in with the widow, she feels almost upstaged when she sees he knows more tender details about her children, about her deceased husband's likes and dislikes, about her - than she herself in all her daily busy-ness - ever stopped to appreciate. This would have been a good premise to pursue. But the movie gets bogged down in slow, sparse exchanges exhaled into the ether. It also gets bogged down in improbabilities. For example, we see Berry inviting Del Toro platonically into her bed to massage her ear, a service she was used to enlisting her husband to perform for her in order to soothe her to sleep. Also, Berry's neighbor takes an immediate, unlikely shine to this recovering drug addict who has moved into Berry's garage. The neighbor encourages Del Toro to join him for daily jogs, and then tutors and sponsors him in becoming a mortgage broker. Del Toro is seen mastering the abstruse material for his broker's test in a mere sixty days, something that would be VERY unlikely to sustain a recovering drug addict's attention. So much artiness is imposed on the relationships here, that despite some good lines (as when Del Toro describes his first hit of drugs like being "kissed by God") - the film drags down into standard, socially conscious angst. The problem is summarized by the directorial decision to have frequent close-ups of the character's eyes, or more typically, of one of their eyes off-center on the screen. These eyes invariably are red-rimmed and strangely, seem to have incipient cataracts forming over them. That is sort of symbolic of this entire movie. It might have started with some vision, but its overlay of 12-step cliche clouds it all into dullness.

Things We Lost in the Fire Available from Amazon Price: $17.99 Updated on 10-4-2008.

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