Border crossings work both ways, despite what the state department thinks, and often to unpredictable ends. Just this week, a respected international auteur comes to Hollywood, only to lose her soul in Things We Lost in the Fire; meanwhile a much-ridiculed movie star directs his first film with Gone Baby Gone and shows us that, with the proper mindset, anyone can transcend the limitations of Tinsel Town.
The movie star is Ben Affleck, but more on him later. The auteur is Susanne Bier, a Danish director who initially made her name as part of Lars Von Trier's Dogme gang and has since accumulated a fair amount of critical acclaim by essentially making the same movie over and over again. Bier's basic scenario, repeated to increasingly commercial effect in Open Hearts, Brothers and, most recently, After the Wedding, goes something like this: A dead, presumed-dead or soon-to-be-dead husband is replaced, if only temporarily, by a morally dubious friend, colleague or relative who steps in, often hesitantly, to comfort the grieving or soon-to-be grieving widow.
This slightly skewed bit of soap-opera plotting — to which the filmmaker attaches such self-serious metaphysical weight it screams out to be called something along the lines of Bier's First Principle of the Transmutation of Emotional Energy — inevitably creates a world of problems. Ultimately, however, the act somehow redeems not only both the bad-boy surrogate and the brokenhearted wife, but also the memory of her former spouse, hammering home a spiritual dimension soap fans don't often find in their afternoon programs.
In Things We Lost in the Fire, David Duchovny is the dead hubby — one of the several things lost in that fire, as if you hadn't guessed — while childhood pal and intermittent drug fiend Benicio Del Toro is his replacement. Halle Berry is the bereaved widow Audrey, and when she walks up to Jerry (Del Toro) at her husband's funeral and confesses her active dislike of the guy, it's hard to misread the director signaling that he'll soon be a hugely important part of her life.
Sure enough, Jerry the Junkie starts helping Audrey around the house, taking her husband's place at the dinner table, going running with a neighbor who insists they jog along the same route the fellow regularly took with the dead man. Before you know it, Audrey's even inviting the recovering addict into her bed, but only platonically — unable to sleep at night, she requests Jerry lie next to her and mimic her former companion's body language. It's a curious little scene that should've been moving, but isn't; like much of Things We Lost in the Fire, it feels self-conscious and contrived, one more gimmicky conceit that tries too hard to slather artistic credibility on what is basically an extremely simple story.
The film piles on the heavy-duty symbolism (we're supposed to read that titular blaze as an essentially metaphorical purging, apparently, and much ado is also made of the cleansing power of water, wind and other elements), but the artsy frills just don't jibe with Things' movie-of-the-week scenario: Jerry bonds with Audrey's adorable kids! Jerry relapses into drugs! Audrey anguishes! Jerry bounces back!
Meanwhile, Bier bombards us with ostentatious shots of hands and other isolated body parts, including more extreme close-ups of eyes than Sergio Leone ever dreamed of. And the camera, while toned down from the seizure-inducing lurches of the director's Dogme days, still occasionally calls undue attention to itself by stuttering and skipping a beat, as if suffering from a series of mini-strokes.
Bier's dilemma is that she seems to be telling a story that she's faintly embarrassed by, and her confusion shows. There's absolutely nothing wrong with melodrama in and of itself, of course — Douglas Sirk proved it could be high art, getting under the skins of the characters and the surface of the text, while Fassbinder paid homage to the form even as he invested it with new meaning.
But Bier just seems to be going through the motions, adding gratuitous flourishes to disguise her lack of faith in material that, frankly, she doesn't quite have the chops to pull off. She's a tinkerer, albeit one with a big Hollywood budget at her disposal, and the more this director spins her wheels, the more superficial Things We Lost in the Fire becomes.
Curiously enough, Bier isn't the only director this week to make a movie driven by someone who isn't really there. The living memory of a dead husband propels Bier's film; the absent presence that hovers over Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, and affects nearly every one of the movie's torturous turns, is a missing child.
Casey Affleck, the director's brother (and star of the extraordinary Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, also opening this week), plays Patrick Kenzie, lifelong resident of a tough Boston neighborhood inhabited by working-class and barely working types who, whether consciously or not, seem to enjoy emulating the losers they're constantly watching on Jerry Springer. Patrick's also a private investigator, and when relatives of that missing child hire him to assist in the investigation, Kenzie quickly finds himself in over his head.
Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, and, frankly, Affleck outdoes Eastwood in several ways, notably in his understanding of the author's Boston. Affleck goes for maximum authenticity here, trolling through Boston's seedier sides with a camera that discreetly observes the non-glamorous flora and fauna, making good use of local actors and virtual unknowns in several key roles.
The director occasionally shows himself to be a touch over-enamored with his blue-collar grotesques — it sometimes seems like every Beantown resident with a hair lip, goiter or obesity problem gets screen time here — but Gone Baby Gone still manages to be an effectively disquieting descent into a local underworld.
Complications ensue, the mystery mutates, and the film turns increasingly ugly and intense, as Patrick's investigation begins probing deep into the world of child killers — and then, perhaps even more chilling, deeper still into the minds of the killers of killers. Lehane's source material culminates in a series of dubious plot twists involving a conspiracy of least likely suspects, but Affleck wisely uses this as a springboard to get into something more interesting, albeit uncomfortable.
The film works fine as a hard-boiled thriller, but it's even better rooting around in ethical dilemmas, particularly the one about how doing the right thing isn't always about doing the right thing.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2007.