Movie Review: House of Sand and Fog

 
It's very tempting to say this movie was much better than I expected it to be, and leave it at that. It's something you ought to discover on your own, without preconceptions or, if possible, expectations.
 
But then I couldn't call this a review and indulge myself by recording my thoughts on it.
 
The movie is a study in fate, struggle and misfortune. Sounds gloomy, I know. It is a gloomy movie, but it's so well crafted you hardly see it.
 
The plot, I suppose, is a little thin. Due to a clerical error, Kathy (the gorgeous Jennifer Connelly) gets evicted from her ancestral home by the beach, and the house is then auctioned off dirt cheap to an Iranian immigrant, Colonel Behrani (Ben Kingsley). Kathy wants her house back, and Behrani's trying to sell the property at a profit, to put his life back together in an America that does not give him the respect he is used to.
 
Kathy enlists the help of her new boyfriend, a weird cop Lester (Ron Eldard), who starts threatening Behrani and his family with deportation. Funnily enough, he never gets into trouble for doing this, even though we're shown Behrani calling his bluff and being told by the police that these threats were out of line. Lester, meanwhile, has his own problems to deal with - he's leaving his wife and two small kids for no apparent reason and they wants explanations, precious.
 
Things spin out of control. Lester ends up taking the Behrani family hostage in their own home, and later causing the death of the colonel's son Elsmail, in an unlikely series of events.
 
The characters act quite stupidly. Why does Kathy even leave the house when it's so obvious she's being evicted unfairly? Why does she refuse to sue the county for its error and go after the blameless Behrani instead? "Suing the county takes months" is the only answer provided.
 
But the triumph of this movie is in its characters and they way they're portrayed by the actors. I love the way the antagonist is so... masked. It's clear, to me at least, that Behrani is the guy who's 'right' (I don't know what the fuss about grey areas is about, the movie makes the distinction between right and wrong quite clearly), but the story is so deeply rooted in real people and whole characters that the villian's villianousness sneaks up on you. I love a movie that can make you forget it's a movie with a story that needs a hero and a villian.
 
Kingsley is quite magnificient. The scenes of his son's death are superbly executed. Connelly is quite decent as well, she looks her part. Eldard is a bit of a cardboard cutout, though that is as much the fault of a lack of character development as his acting skills. It grates when he speaks, especially because Connelly and Kingsley and the rest do cast a convincing spell. Some of the other secondary characters leave the same impression, though Behrani's wife and son are the notable exceptions. Superb portrayals, both of them.
 
I'm just picking on minor things that don't really matter. What matters is that this is a movie infinitely worth watching. It's different, it's subtle in all sorts of ways, it's got layers to keep the most analytical of us happy. I liked it.