HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG

-By Lewis Beale

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Based on Andre Dubus III's best-selling novel, tyro director Vadim Perelman's film is a brilliant treatise on people who do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. Essentially a three-character chamber piece, House of Sand and Fog plays like a Shakespearean tragedy for the 21st century.

Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly) is a recovering alcoholic who loses the title to her family home through a series of errors. Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley) is the former Iranian military officer who buys the house at auction, hoping to spruce it up and resell it for a profit. Realizing her mistake, Kathy tries to get her house back through legal means, but soon realizes that will take too long. Meanwhile, she's living in her car.

Kathy eventually hooks up with Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard), a sympathetic cop dealing with a bad marriage who soon becomes her lover and defender. Kathy's desperation, Massoud's pride and Lester's intervention soon add up to a series of mistakes, false moves and just plain bad luck that end in a chain of very bad denouements.

House of Sand and Fog is, in a sense, one of those schematic works where you can see the end coming from a long way off. But this hardly matters. Under Perelman's forceful but subtle direction, all three main characters are fully realized humans, and none of them is a villain. They are all just flawed people trying to do the best that they can with an impossible situation.

This humanism is enhanced thanks to the brilliant work of the leads. Oscar winner Kingsley, who has never been better, gives an amazingly rich performance as the proud former military man, who is working as a laborer on a road crew and wants nothing better than to restore something of his former glory. It is an astonishingly rich, and anguished, piece of work.

Connelly, the other Oscar winner in the cast, also performs at the peak of her gifts, making Kathy a flawed but basically decent person who is simply trying to survive. And Eldard is excellent as the confused lover, who wants to help his girlfriend but can't seem to figure out the right way to do so.

A top-of-the-line piece of Hollywood filmmaking, House of Sand and Fog will probably have a hard time competing in the moviegoing feeding frenzy that occurs every Christmas season. This is a film that needs strong reviews, and will get them. Whether it will also get an audience is another matter entirely.

-Lewis Beale