Berry and Del Toro bring passion to "Fire"

Things We Lost in the Fire

By Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Things We Lost in the Fire" is an unstable mix of a tearjerker, junkie-recovery story and odd-couple pairing. The film marks the American debut of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, whose European films show a strong affinity for stories of human frailties and of families unraveling.

So this one is right up her alley.

One final twist: In going for the best actors, Bier has put together a racially mixed cast with Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro in roles that were undoubtedly written as white. What a refreshing change.

Despite the challenges of blending a European sensibility into a Hollywood production, the film holds together not all that badly. Bier brings her audience into the film, to live the story with the characters in a manner highly unusual in an American film. Normally such dramatic intensity and keen observation come in top Sundance films pitched to small adult audiences, but with Oscar-winning actors top billed and the full-court press of Paramount's marketing team, "Fire" could and should break out to a much wider audience.

The film does not initially follow a linear path. Tacking forward and back over a brief period of time, the film, written by Allan Loeb, much more effectively conveys a sense of devastating loss than chronology would provide. A comfortable, happy family of four suffers the tragic death of the father, Brian Burke (David Duchovny). Yet because Brian appears on and off throughout these opening scenes via flashbacks, his actual absence becomes all the more an emotional, physical and even spiritual void.

If there is a false note here it is that this is a family set up for a fall: Everyone is too happy, comfortable and good looking to be real, and dad is impossibly good. He even dies a hero's death, trying to rescue a battered woman from her abusive -- and, it turns out, murderous -- husband. He also is a real estate genius who leaves behind enough of a nest egg that the only issue confronting his family is his loss.

There apparently was only one sore point between Brian and his loving, sexy wife Audrey (Berry). She neither understands nor appreciates his continuing friendship and support of childhood friend Jerry (Del Toro), a lawyer who has landed on skid row thanks to heroin addiction. So Jerry's appearance, at Audrey's generous invitation, during Brian's funeral is that of a ghost from another world -- yet a world in which he knows things about Brian that his wife does not.