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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/18/07)

Benicio Del Toro's subtle, searing, get-under-your-skin performance as a junkie seeking redemption — while wondering what the hell redemption is any good for anyway — is your first, best reason to see this ambitious and largely artful drama from acclaimed Danish director Bier (Brothers, After the Wedding), working from a script by Allan Loeb.

The picture begins with the storybook life of Steven and Audrey Burke (Duchovny and Berry) and their two children torn asunder. Steven is dead, the victim of a senseless crime that occurred as a result of Steven's attempt to do the right thing. As the flashbacks that recur throughout the film attest, Steven was a mensch's mensch, never more so than in his determination to stick by his fallen buddy Jerry (Del Toro). As a frazzled Audrey prepares for Steven's funeral, she's compelled to extend an invitation to Jerry, who she's shunned for years, largely out of resentment towards Steven's loyalty to him. A loss this huge does weird things to a person, and soon Audrey's reaching out further to Jerry, offering him room and board in their recently burned-out garage, which Steven was renovating when he died.

Yes, I know — this sounds in certain particulars like Monster's Ball, which earned Berry an Oscar for playing a widowed wife who falls into an intense relationship with her husband's executioner. But trust me, it's not really like that at all. The interactions here are largely more complex. Jerry cleans up a bit and effortlessly, or so it seems, bonds with Steven and Audrey's two adorable kids. Audrey's grief has twisted her up so much that her relations with Jerry take on all sorts of weird, attraction/repulsion dimensions, leading her to indulge in some very nearly hateful power plays. It's dense, unstinting stuff that does not, indeed cannot, lead to the explosion of erotic release that was the centerpiece of Monster's Ball.

The film also has an unexpected and rich vein of humor. John Carroll Lynch — you might know him as Norm Gunderson of Fargo — is a stitch as a neighbor of the Burkes who's as henpecked as husbands get and who takes Jerry under his wing in a far more straightforward fashion than Audrey does. Toward the end of the picture, an attractive-but-somewhat-clingy recovering addict (Lohman) makes her presence felt, and Loeb's heretofore sharp writing takes on a too-literal tinge, but Del Toro sets himself apart from these pitfalls and keeps Jerry painfully human. The film's two-pronged finale has one sappily sentimental component and another harrowingly ambiguous one; it's the latter, enacted by Del Toro speaking directly into the camera, which will stick with you.

— Glenn Kenny