Film is a natural medium for addressing social concerns, and recent socially relevant fictional films have enjoyed commercial and critical success.
First-time director Vadim Perelman found a jewel of a controversy in the pages of the novel “House of Sand and Fog,” a book about the indignities of immigration and intra-family miscommunication. Ultimately, Perelman is unable to exploit the particularities of film while engaging these issues. He ultimately adds nothing to the conversation.
“House” is the story of three families living in the San Francisco Bay area. A recovering alcoholic, Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), is living alone in her seaside home. In the first scene, we learn that she hasn’t told her family that her husband has left her.
After losing her home via a bureaucratic error and auction, Nicolo seeks refuge in the arms of an unhappily married police officer. The officer (Ron Eldard) is also grappling with a family that doesn’t suit him and takes up with the vulnerable Nicolo in hopes of striking out in a new direction.
The struggling Behrani family is caught in the middle when former Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), a man of great pride and stature in his native Iran, buys the property at the county auction. After suffering great indignities as an anonymous immigrant, Behrani sees the house as an opportunity to restore his honor.
At this point, the film could have been an evocative portrayal of the sometimes-overlapping dissolution in these families. Instead, almost complete focus is given to the arbitrary and somewhat absurd circumstance of the house and its rightful ownership.
The way this plays out on screen is almost comical at times. The struggle for the property starts out as a reasonable disagreement between two parties but spirals so totally out of control that the last third of the film could be passed off as some kitschy melodrama.
Despite this, it is inevitable that advocates of this film will say that it raises important and timely debates about immigration and the state of the nuclear family. However, the action of the film does nothing to animate or personalize these ubiquitous concerns.
For example, Connelly’s character is developed just far enough to sketch the general appearance of a disenfranchised, lonely alcoholic. She does little to explore this scenario further. The gesture paid in attending to this issue comes across as meager and half-hearted.
In fact, time doesn’t seem to ever pass in “House of Sand and Fog.” The story is so carelessly crafted around the actors and their angst that it looks as if they are standing still and their unfortunate circumstances merely a cheap moving backdrop, like those used in the early days of Hollywood.
While Kingsley’s performance is focused and evocative, his character’s place in the narrative is neither. Kingsley could have been a real Iranian immigrant and it wouldn’t have mattered. He still would have been an unsupported snapshot, static and two-dimensional.
The characters are introduced and then left to suffocate. The film comes across as a self-conscious, pandering attempt to seduce the intelligent filmgoer by reminding him or her of what they heard on NPR last week.
To be fair, “House” is not completely worthless. The presence of some talented actors coupled with the aforementioned boon that usually accompanies the tackling of relevant social issues is unmistakably a recipe for success.
Unfortunately, due to the flagging and at times ridiculous plotline, these resources appear trapped under glass and come across as they would in a jewelry display: isolated, gaudy and overstated.C