What has happened to Kathy isn't precisely her fault, but she could easily have prevented it -- for example, by responding to some of the delinquency notices that have been piling up among her unopened mail. Her self-destructiveness is bitterly galling, but we never quite believe she's a bad person, and every false step she takes will make you wince. Should she really go out with that beefcake deputy (Ron Eldard) who helped evict her -- the one who's wearing a wedding ring and who likes to drink wine? (Remember, Kathy's a recovering alcoholic.) Should she really start smoking again? Should she really buy a dozen of those little airplane-size bottles of José Cuervo and then go for a long late-night drive? (Well, nobody should do that -- the larger bottles are much more economical.)

On the other hand, Behrani is somebody who has done everything right, without quite managing to do the right thing. Kingsley is justly renowned for his chameleonic ability to play any ethnicity, and here he comes off as the very embodiment of Persian aristocratic pride. He loves his wife and son, and can be tender and generous to them, but does not tolerate any questioning of his authority. His contempt for the laziness and fecklessness of Americans like Kathy -- "They have the eyes of small children, forever looking for the next distraction," Behrani tells his son -- is only worsened by the ignorance and casual racism with which they treat him. Not that he is altogether innocent of such attitudes himself; early on, he rages at his wife: "I did not come to America to work like an Arab! To be treated like an Arab!"

Behrani's pride won't let him smile over the mistake, take his money back and move his family out, and Kathy's combination of wounded arrogance and sheer desperation won't allow her to leave the Behranis alone. By the time Behrani decapitates the top of her house to install a "widow's walk" from which to see the ocean (it's actually a good idea), and Kathy winds up in their bathroom with a nasty puncture wound in her foot and Mrs. Behrani making her tea, "House of Sand and Fog" begins to feel like a comedy of errors that isn't one bit funny.

Perelman and his co-writer, Shawn Lawrence Otto, handle one of the central (and unanswerable) questions of Dubus' novel -- the question of how justice can ever be rendered in such a botched situation -- with great delicacy. As Kathy marvels to her lawyer after her semi-accidental return to the house, the Behranis are "already more at home there than I ever was." In his autocratic, often maddening fashion, Behrani has invested this ramshackle house with something very much like love, an emotion of which Kathy seems frankly incapable -- but the fact remains that his ownership of the place is only a fluke of fate.

As "House of Sand and Fog" grinds toward a devastating collision, the careful balance between its characters finally falls apart. On one hand we have Kingsley, the luminous Aghdashloo (a grande dame of the Iranian expatriate community) and the sweet and serious Ahdout, a family that for all its old-fashioned sexism and dysfunction is based, at least in theory, on dignity, love and mutual respect. On the other, we have Kathy, spiraling back into the bottle and clinging -- because she has nothing else -- to the demented schemes of Eldard's unhappily married deputy, who's as bent on self-destruction as she is. I guess his character is supposed to be a cipher, but the part is undercooked to the point of rawness, and Eldard's male-model blankness makes him seem more like a leftover cyborg from "Terminator 3" than a plausible loose-cannon cop.

Memorably photographed by Roger Deakins, one of our era's great cinematographers, "House of Sand and Fog" is a dizzying, nightmarish plunge into the atavistic cruelty that lies beneath the surface of everyday American life. The house of sand and fog in Dubus' title is not that perky little bungalow with the crooked shades but the nation whose ideology of mutual self-interest (and whose bureaucratized, impersonal society) creates disasters like this one. For Vadim Perelman, this marks the beginning of an auspicious career. Ben Kingsley is likely to rack up more awards nominations, and if Connelly doesn't follow suit, it's only because her role isn't as showy. But for some moviegoers -- most, actually -- reruns or Toys 'R Us might be a safer bet.

Recent Stories