For the first twenty minutes or half-hour of Things We Lost in the Fire I thought that Susanne Bier, my current favorite director, had succeeded in transferring her wondrous Danish idiom into a big-name Hollywood production. I loved the unusual but profound relationships, especially between Brian Burke, the real-estate developer, and his childhood friend and heroin addict Jerry Sunborne. It was all far-off-the-grid, but it rang true. It's not easy to make a European movie in the American system. Nevertheless, I was disappointed when the second half of the film fell into deep cliche and became a familiar saga of addiction-recovery, complete with predictable confessions at the Narc-Anon shop. Brian's wife Audrey, played by the impossibly radiant Halle Berry, dominates the film equally as much with her acting as her beauty, but the script poses insuperable challenges — especially when she is asked to retain her sexual innocence while snuggling in bed with Jerry. The direction is as might be expected highly accomplished, but I'm concerned that Bier's fondness for extreme close-ups, sometimes of only a single eye, has devolved into mere mannerism. The film received passable reviews but was a box-office failure, which is, unfortunately, not difficult to understand.
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