By Armond White

Thing We Lost In The Fire
Directed by Susanne Bier

Sometimes you want to ask a filmmaker one question: Why was this film made? Things We Lost in the Fire goes so far off the narrative path, it never gives a reason for director Susanne Bier telling this story of the grief suffered by a wife, Audrey (Halle Berry), and her dead husband’s best friend, Jerry (Benicio del Toro).
Bier ignores mournful details—memories that trigger pain, moments of isolation, sudden jolts of bereavement. Instead, she circles around Audrey and Jerry: their ethnic backgrounds, their clumsy sympathy and resentment, his heroin addiction, their brief bonding to keep the fatherless children stable, his eventual recovery. Bier’s doing a mood piece, including flashbacks that never structure meaning into the current situation, lots of long, elliptical atmosphere shots and innumerable close-ups of eyeballs.
It’s all so preciously unrealistic that the suggestion of a multiracial enclave (including Audrey’s white in-laws and her two odd, biracial, bushy-haired kids) is indistinct. Neil Jordan implied the advances of a multicultural world with subtlety and romance in The Brave One, particularly through Jodie Foster and Terence Howard’s soulful duets. And Adam Sandler/Don Cheadle glossed the same in Reign On Me. But Things We Lost in the Fire never defines its politically-correct utopia. Bier goes after the grace of the supernatural climax in The Best of Youth where beneficence reaches in from beyond the grave, but it feels contrived here.
Luckily, Del Toro is a nearly magnificent presence. With his furrowed brow and upswept hair, his eccentricity replaces Halle Berry’s beauty (here turned blank and unpleasant). Del Toro smiles like Brad Pitt, broods like James Dean. His face is alternately grotesque and handsome and is especially compelling when his eyes light up, making him charming. He’s both beast and beauty in a movie that mismanages the idea that life is not a fairy tale.