Danish director Susanne Bier’s fondness for melodrama continues with Things We Lost in the Fire, a reasonably sturdy saga of loss, grieving and addiction buoyed by a fierce, formidable performance from Benicio Del Toro. Bier’s English-language debut concerns the aftershocks of husband and father Steven’s (David Duchovny) sudden murder, which thoroughly reconfigures the lives of both Steven’s widow Audrey (Halle Berry) and his childhood best friend Jerry (Del Toro), a flophouse-dwelling heroin junkie whom Steven, against his wife’s wishes, continued to visit and help out. In response to the tragedy, Audrey asks Jerry to move into the family’s garage, which is in the process of being renovated after a calamitous fire. Although such a plot development seems destined to lead to a corny situation whereby Jerry becomes Audrey’s surrogate for Steven, Bier’s film instead overtly addresses the impractical, unbelievable impossibility of that scenario before moving on to examine the painful and difficult ongoing process of recovery. Things We Lost in the Fire is often as overwrought as it is heartrending – a scene in which Audrey asks Jerry to get in her bed and rub her earlobe the way Steven used to is embarrassingly awful. Still, Bier more often than not keeps things grounded in relatable, realistic sentiments, while Del Toro conveys an awe-inspiring range of raw, naked emotions that are all somehow amplified – rather than turned facile – by his raft of quirky, crazy mannerisms.
Comments