By STEVE PERSALL and PHILIP BOOTH
Published August 28, 2003
The secret lives of dentists
'Dentists' examines truth decay
The Secret Lives of Dentists (R) (105 min.) - Alan Rudolph's films usually sneak up on those viewers who don't give up early on his oblique sense of drama. Like his patron saint, Robert Altman, Rudolph likes to accumulate small moments that don't count for much until the movie's over. The wait can be entirely tedious and pointless (Trixie, Afterglow, The Moderns). Or else frequently tedious, heading toward pointlessness, then steadying into a position of mild interest, like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Rudolph's latest, The Secret Lives of Dentists.
The most underrated actor working today, Campbell Scott (Roger Dodger), plays Dave Hurst, a mild-mannered dentist with a superficially pleasant life: three cute daughters and lovely wife, Dana (Hope Davis), prosperous enough to have a great suburban home and a cabin in upstate New York. Rudolph and screenwriter Craig Lucas, working from Jane Smiley's novella The Age of Grief, emphasize Dave's humdrum side, perhaps a bit too long before he knows what we can guess: things aren't as pleasant as they seem.
Dana's hobby is singing opera, and when Dave drops her off at a concert, he thinks he sees her sharing a romantic moment with another man. The beauty of Rudolph's film is how he allows us to see what Dave sees, then steers toward reasons why we might not be able to trust his eyes. His behavior becomes erratic, especially his imagined conversations with a rude patient named Slater (Denis Leary), who eggs him on to confront Dana. Obviously Dave is losing it, but is that the effect of the escalating household tension, or its cause?
Scott plays it close to the vest, making Dave's occasional outburst as stunning for our ears as they are to Dana. This is a tricky role, not for its flash but its smolder. Rudolph concocts several hallucinations for Dave to encounter and Scott's bloodless character reacts just enough to keep viewers guessing what's next. Dana's responses to Dave, and the mystery of her fidelity, are more evidence of Davis' talent. Leary's ratty persona is perfect for Dave's alter ego, spewing the bile the dentist has swallowed for years without a rinse.
Lucas' screenplay is filled with lines piquing interest, although Rudolph takes his bittersweet time making points about trust, marriage, parenthood and insanity, and those points may not be recognized until long after the theater lights come on. B
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
You must remember this . . .
And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen (PG-13) (133 min.) - Claude Lelouch begins his film with three disparate scenes: an occult attempt to heal a woman (Patricia Kaas), a jewel thief (Jeremy Irons) succeeding on chutzpah rather than force, and a cabaret sequence starring the woman seeking healing, her roommate and the trumpeter coming between them. Right away, it's evident that Lelouch is dodging linear storytelling but sticking to his sentimental guns; sentiment for romantic films like To Catch a Thief and a decidedly French (i.e. slow-moving) study of amnesia, real and imagined.
The theme is the persistence of love even with the fallibility of memory. The thief, Valentin Valentin, has good reason to forget things, with a vague medical condition coming into focus. Irons looks more relaxed than usual, playing along with Valentin's transparent disguises and ruggedly following his desires, both criminal and romantic.
The singer, Jane Lester, has every reason to wish to forget, a victim of love once returned and now gone. Kaas makes an impressive film debut, especially with her singing. Lelouch tells their stories in parallel fashion, dotted with exotic locales and cocktail lounge versions of classic love songs, yet with a sense of impending tragedy. When the film isn't working as a love story, it crackles as a caper flick. As the noose tightens on Valentin, Lelouch adds a somber edge that makes his elusiveness easier to hope for. Even his cheats for our affections have enough class to be enjoyable.
The time shuffling tricks, diversion into three stories and Valentin's fantasy sequences are elaborate touches for such a simple plot. But it's that extra attention to behavioral detail making And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen always interesting to observe. The film is shown with English subtitles for its frequent French and Italian dialogue. B+
- S.P.
"Le Divorce" is Le ordinary
Le Divorce (115 min.) (PG-13) - The storied Merchant-Ivory filmmaking team, responsible for stately, sumptuously photographed period pieces, fumbles when it comes to more contemporary settings. A case in point is Le Divorce, with Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts as attractive, blond American stepsisters, variously lucky and unlucky in love in modern-day Paris. The cast of first-rate talents also includes Thierry Lhermitte, Leslie Caron, Stockard Channing and Glenn Close. But the various, overlapping dramas of the story, adapted from a Diane Johnson novel, are curiously uninvolving.
Isabel Walker (Hudson), footloose and free-spirited, arrives in Paris for a vacation that quickly turns into a mission of mercy, as she lends much-needed emotional support to Roxie (Watts), who is a poet, pregnant and newly abandoned by her French husband, Charles-Henri (Melvil Poupaud). He has moved on to a ditsy Russian woman, Magda. Charles-Henri's new flame has a spouse (Matthew Modine, looking uncomfortable in a thankless role) who, inexplicably, decides to take out his anger on the suffering Roxie.
Isabel quickly wanders into a relationship with a man "of a certain age," as a mutual writer friend (Close) terms the married Edgar (Lhermitte), a conservative politician who just happens to be Charles-Henri's uncle. Over dinner at an ultrafancy restaurant, Edgar asks Isabel, straight out, to be his mistress; he marks his territory by giving her a red alligator-skin Hermes handbag.
Also woven into the story, somewhat laboriously, is a plot strand concerning the efforts of Charles-Henri, his mother (Caron) and other family members to claim ownership of a potentially valuable French painting that's long been owned by the Walkers, aptly represented by Thomas Lennon, as the patently insensitive brother, and Channing and Sam Waterston as the parents.
It all adds up to a souffle of a romantic comedy, with a commentary about American-Gallic relations - the cultures are simply born to clash - that's less than trenchant. Call it a letdown. B-
