House of Sand and Fog: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

Vadim Perelman’s “House of Sand and Fog,” from a screenplay Perelman and Shawn Lawrence based on Andre Dubus III’s novel, is one of the low points of the current movie season. But then it’s meant to be.

The film is a tragedy, filled with heartbreak, ruin and snowballing despair. It features a murder, a double suicide, an attempted suicide, a second attempted suicide, homelessness, divorce, battery, and alcoholism.

Without flinching, Perelman shows you all of it. Without wavering, he let’s you have it in the gut. As such, a mix of hopelessness, rage, and grief hang over the movie like an incurable malaise.

Coming out of it—and you do have to emerge from this film—is like coming out of an argument you spectacularly lost.

You feel beaten up by it, exhausted by it and more than a bit used by it. By the time the movie approaches its inevitable outcome, it has all become too much, with characters you’ve come to like and respect--in spite of their stupid, bull-headed decisions--choosing irrevocable paths certain to leave you in a funk.

The reason it works as well as it does is because the movie is human, the characters are real, and the performances are a jolt. This is a raw, complicated film—one somehow bleaker and more depressing than the recent “21 Grams”--and the emotions that accompany it are suitably charged.

In the movie, Jennifer Connelly is Kathy Nicolo, a recovering alcoholic who inherits a small, beachside bungalow from her dead father and swiftly loses it within eight months, thus squandering what it took him 30 years to pay off.

Compounding her problems is the deep depression she’s been in since her husband left her. Unable to function, Kathy has ignored her mail, thus allowing it to pile up at her front door and missing the city tax notices warning her about the lien against her property. When she’s kicked out by authorities, she’s speechless, knowing for certain that someone must have made a mistake.

Enter colonel Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), an Iranian émigré and U.S. citizen who once knew great wealth and power, but who now works menial jobs to provide for his family, which includes his wife, Nadi (the amazing Shohreh Aghdashloo), who speaks only broken English, and his teenage son, Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout), who is the center of Behrani’s world.

When Kathy’s house goes up for auction at a price four times below its appraised value, Behrani, no fool, snaps it up, buying the property with what little money he has left. His intent is to sell the house as quickly as possible so he can put his family in a better financial situation.

It’s a nice thought, but the short of it is this: A bureaucratic screw-up essentially screwed Kathy out of her house. She wants it back, but Behrani already has put it on the market, and he’s not giving it up anytime soon. Between them, war builds, with Kathy leaning hard on her new beau, deputy sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard), who is fresh out of his own marriage and eager to prove his new affection for Kathy—regardless of the costs. So, you can imagine how ugly things get.

Kingsley is excellent, containing his emotions until they can no longer be held back, and Connelly herself is just suitably out of it to be believable in the part. Still, the soul of the movie belongs to Aghdashloo’s Nadi.

The actress, herself an Iranian exile, gives one of 2003’s best, most haunting performances.

Perelman uses her not only as a relatively safe place to invest our emotions when the situation between Behrani and Kathy becomes fully out of hand, but also as a balance between the two characters. As such, hers is the trickiest part to play, but Aghdashloo’s accomplished turn gives the film the grounding sense of believability it needs, particularly as Perelman pushes toward the film’s melodramatic final act, which is at once touching, awful, exploitative and, at least in this context, inevitable.

Grade: B+