House of Sand and Fog

Last night I saw the film House of Sand and Fog, starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It had all the atmospherics of a hard-boiled detective story without actually being a detective story.

It's hard to go wrong with Ben Kingsley, because he's a great actor with lots of experience. This is also the best I've seen Jennifer Connelly. I mean, I liked The Hulk, because I always like stories about muscle-men named Bruce. But that was an action movie, and her character wasn't especially sympathetic.

Without spoiling the plot, the story House of Sand and Fog has to do with a young woman (Connelly) in the San Francisco Bay Area who loses the house that she inherited from her father when the county seizes it for unpaid taxes. An Iranian immigrant (Kingsley) buys it, not realizing there was going to be a legal dispute over it.

The plot is reminiscent of a mystery story, but the mystery is not so much a whodunnit but a question of what's motivating the characters. What develops is a conflict driven by the weaknesses of Connelly's character, the vanity and pride of Kingsley's character and the impulsiveness of Connelly's new boyfriend.

Director Vadim Perelman provides some wonderful visuals to set the mood, illustrating once again that you don't have to have gore and blood spurting everywhere to create a sense of suspense and creepiness. The first part of the film shows parallels between the Kingsley character and Connelly's lives, which then intersect in a very unexpected way.

A film can usually carry one big unbelievable element, but if you pile too many on, it makes the whole story unbelievable. There was only one in this movie, which is that Connelly's character is supposed to be a woman with a lot of problems and her life in chaos, but she looks way too fit and well-groomed for that. But one unbelievable element is forgivable. And in this case, it was clearly done that way to present Connelly at her Hollywood-glamorous, beautiful best so, hey, I can go with that.

Don't get me wrong: this film convinced me that Connelly is a talented actress. Despite the excessive glamour, she makes a character that could have been either unsympathetic or melodramatically hysterical into a flawed but sympathetic heroine.