A HOUSE DIVIDED, SET TO FALL
Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie CriticTHE ORLANDO SENTINEL
***** House of Sand and Fog (DreamWorks; 128 minutes; rated R for some violence/disturbing images, language and a scene of sexuality; priced for rental, $26.99 for DVD): The house in House of Sand and Fog is where dreams intersect and cultures collide.
Ben Kingsley is a rigid, proud former Iranian colonel who maintains his family's precarious place within the Iranian expatriate community at great expense. He works days on a highway construction crew, nights at a convenience store. Somehow, he earns enough to keep the family in a prestigious apartment and lies enough about what he does to his sheltered wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and others to marry his daughter into a well-connected family.
But he has a son who must go to the best college, so he has another plan. The ad in the paper for a seized-property auction puts the plan in motion.
The American dream still works, we think, for just a moment.
And then there's the other side of the story. Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly) is barely keeping it together. She has been in an unemployed alcoholic depression. She can't tell her far-off family that her husband left her six months ago. She doesn't open her mail. She doesn't see the tax notice. There has been a mistake. But the wheels of justice have rolled over her and sold it before she realizes what has hit her -- another American dream, this one shattered.
House of Sand and Fog marches mournfully, resolutely toward a finale you will never expect. And it shimmers with the heat of impending violence.
Director Vadim Perelman, a native of Russia who got his start making commercials, connects the landscape of the film's title with the obscuring complexities of its plot, capturing the fog sweeping across the hills and the halcyon past that the colonel remembers in Iran.
Connelly re-earns the Oscar she won for A Beautiful Mind's makeup with this raw, vulnerable performance.
And Aghdashloo, an Iranian expatriate struggling to make it in Hollywood, is a revelation, a caldron of repression, fear and rage. She lashes out at the life they must lead, even as her role as a good Persian wife prevents her from helping solve their problems or even discussing them with her husband.