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'Lost in the Fire' stars sizzle on the screen
Playing a bereaved wife and friend sparks white-hot performances by Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro.
By Steve Persall, Times film critic
Published October 18, 2007
REVIEW
Things We Lost in the FireGrade: B
Director: Susanne Bier
Cast: Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Alison Lohman, Micah Berry, Alexis Llewellyn, John Carroll Lynch, Omar Benson Miller, Sarah Dubrovsky
Screenplay: Allan Loeb
Rating: strong drug content and profanity
Running time: 110 min.
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Give Halle Berry the right role, and you'll see an actor unafraid to try anything and capable of making it work. Give Benicio Del Toro any role, and you'll glimpse greatness.
Things We Lost in the Fire, a downbeat story of loss and recovery that becomes modestly uplifting, gives both Academy Award winners what their talents deserve. Whatever you think will happen likely won't, but what occurs between their characters feels right.
Berry finally delivers a performance that proves Monsters Ball wasn't a fluke. She plays Audrey Burke, who has everything she could desire for a wonderful life except - suddenly and tragically - a husband. Flashbacks show why Audrey loved Brian (David Duchovny), a great provider and father to their adorable children until a kind act led to his death.
Jerry Sunborne (Del Toro) also loved Brian, for reasons Audrey resented. Jerry is a heroin addict who threw away his law career for the needle. Brian never gave up on him, always ready to offer groceries and emotional support. Brian's death shocks Jerry into Narcotics Anonymous sobriety; it's another legacy of the kind person Audrey misses.
Something is in the air with Audrey and Jerry, but it's not romance. That would be too Hollywood and entirely at odds with their loyalties to the deceased.
They spend most of Susanne Bier's movie shedding their weaknesses by exposing them, a matter of trust rather than lust.
Allan Loeb's screenplay is a little too tidy in bringing them together in grief, and sometimes it's melodramatic about their bond - a scene in which Audrey begs to try heroin to forget her pain, for example. A subplot about Jerry's attraction to another addict (Alison Lohman) feels phony. But whatever the script asks them to do, Berry and Del Toro are committed to making it authentic.
Bier's first English-language film after defecting from Lars von Trier's Dogme experiments retains some of that movement's rough aesthetics. Close-ups are plentiful, to give every tic and tear its due. Scenes are provided plenty of room to breathe, and sometimes the most happens when the least is obvious.
Things We Lost in the Fire isn't entirely conducive to American expectations of movies, especially with those big stars at center stage.
There is something laudable about producers allowing a foreign artist her vision and celebrated actors' realizing this won't be a hit, yet playing it like one. This is serious filmmaking and acting with a capital "s," wrapped around a lower-case script.
Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com.
[Last modified October 16, 2007, 17:53:22]
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