I saw an early preview of House of Sand and Fog almost two months ago and I'm still feeling its dramatic power. This adaptation of an extraordinary novel by Andre Dubus III is a brilliantly shot and edited movie from a gifted new filmmaker, Vadim Perelman.
Be warned however, this is not standard entertainment. It is the cinematic equivalent of going to see a great tragic play like Medea or Romeo and Juliet for the first time. It is a classically structured tragedy, where good people, each with his or her flaw, are on a collision course because of their overlapping lives. Though we can see many of the sad events coming, there is no way to predict the ultimately agonizing resolution. The Greeks had a word for our reaction—catharsis. This is about as close as a movie has ever come to achieving it.
The story is a simple one. Two strangers are thrust into conflict over the ownership of a house. A young woman, Kathy Nicolo (Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly), dumped by a runaway husband, has locked herself in the house she recently inherited from her father, letting herself waste away. Suddenly, the county forecloses on her for back taxes and she is evicted by a deputy.
At that exact moment, we meet a middle-aged Iranian working nights at a gas station. At dawn, he goes into the men's room in an office building with a gym bag and a suit. When he leaves, he's clean, shaved and in the suit. He hops into a vintage Mercedes and drives off. A cut later, he enters an ornately furnished apartment to greet his wife and 12-year-old son.
Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), formerly a colonel in the Shah's air force, is entering the second year of his family's refugee exile in America. (The film is set in 1991.) We see a proud man desperately trying to preserve the dignity of his family. He reads of the public auction of a repossessed house. With the last of his savings, he will buy it as both his family's sanctuary and as an investment.
Meanwhile, Kathy's lawyer discovers that the county foreclosed prematurely and she has the right to sue to get it back. But by the time she can file, the house has already been sold to Behrani.
Both people desperately need the house to the extent that neither can possibly see the other's point of view. The conflict is complicated and plagued by necessity. Compounding the problem is the vast cultural and linguistic gap between them.
Now enters the sympathetic deputy who evicted the woman (Ron Eldard). His conscience has been bothering him, and he is unhappily married. Romantically drawn to Kathy, he sees a chance to come to her rescue.
We see the potential for disaster, though we hope and wish, and are even at times led to believe, that the many good traits of each person will rise to let reason triumph. We also feel their pain because, in a given circumstance, we could be any of them.
The narrative's power is heightened by Perelman's directorial skill. The parallel cutting is masterful. The acting is uniformly superb, with Kingsley standing out as a contender for his second Oscar. The Iranian actors playing his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and son (Jonathan Ahdout) are touchingly real, as is Eldard. Connelly, in a deserved starring role, is fine too, even though her character is the film's one small flaw. She is written as such a passive, self-destructive creature, she often defies our sympathy even when she is in the right.
House of Sand and Fog is a great dramatic movie that will linger in our hearts and minds. Perelman has shown the rare cinematic skill of actually arousing our emotions, and leaving us much to think about long after the fade-out.