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Movie review: “Things We Lost In the Fire”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
In “Things We Lost in the Fire” a young woman who lost the love of her life says, “It doesn’t get better, it gets different.” Two characters coping with the worst in their lives do manage to make it better, after titanic struggles to deal with the reality of just how different they and their lives will forever be.
Not just external events exert pressure. Assaults on the characters’ deepest sense of themselves, their worth and their place in a suddenly, for one character, chaotic world and chronically so for the other, move them off center and back into the tenuous stream of life.
Audrey Burke (Halle Berry) has just lost her husband Brian (David Duchovny). Because the cold facts of his senseless death leave her few options for closure or acceptance, she seeks a scapegoat for the tragedy in the person of derelict drug abuser Jerry Sunborne (Benicio Del Toro).
The irony of her antipathy is that Brian never abandoned his college friend even when Jerry’s life hit the skids and spun into monotonous bouts of self-destruction. Audrey never quite came to terms with Brian’s refusal to “give up on” Jerry. But, now, with the better man of the two, to her way of thinking, erased from her and her children’s life, Audrey wonders why it “couldn’t have been Jerry” that took the bullet. Maybe because Brian would have wanted her to; maybe because Jerry is a connection to Brian—a connection she cannot face yet breaking; maybe because there must be some good in Jerry if Brian loved him so, Audrey seeks out the drug addict fighting to get clean—maybe because Brian would have wanted him to. Confused about why Audrey has opened her home to him, skeptical about the worth of his support group and its serenity prayer that sticks in his throat and scared of failure when he’s offered a chance to practice law again. He’ s suspicious of the sincerity of forgiveness and welcome this family has offered him, Jerry makes one step of relapse for every two of transformation.
Ultimately, recognizing how close Audrey is drifting towards the abyss of “escape” that she longs for to cope with the pain of Brian’s absence will be Jerry’s salvation.
Del Toro’s character and layered performance trump Berry’s intelligently modulated intensity; but each contributes an indelible impact to this very human drama. A Neal Street production, DreamWorks/Paramount release, rated R for drug content and language.
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