![]() ![]() Sad ironies abound: the spectacle of a skilled aviator, who still prominently displays a photograph of him with the shah in his living room, reduced to menial work a daughter losing in a matter of months the legacy her father worked years to secure a man, Lester, repeating the unwanted pattern set by his own father of leaving his kids, and benignly reintroducing to substance abuse the very woman he’s dedicated to helping and immigrants showing a better grasp of how to work the system than lifelong Americans.Īll these subtleties and nuances, worked out by Dubus in his book, contribute to a story bracingly devoid of good guy/bad guy dynamics. At the same time, young Esmail comes to feel sorry for the bedraggled woman. Despite Lester’s advice, Kathy can’t keep away from her old home on one visit to protest the addition of a widow’s walk Behrani is adding to officially give it an ocean view, Kathy steps on nails, and is moved by the doting attention lavished upon her by Nadi. Still, momentary hopes spring from little bursts of humanity that emerge from the rigid positions. ![]() ![]() Disdainful of Americans for being soft and undisciplined and offended at being commonly mistaken for an Arab or a gypsy, Behrani considers Kathy commonplace and a whore.įor their part, Kathy and Lester view Behrani as a money-grubbing usurper, immorally taking what’s not rightfully his. In an intricate succession of mistakes, wrong decisions, happenstance and bad luck, the friction between the vying parties becomes worse, exacerbated by mutual suspicions and knee-jerk prejudices. Lester is unhappily married, sticking around only for his two kids, but soon confesses that he feels “found” with Kathy, who is emotionally cautious but has no reason not to embrace the only prospect life offers her. Originally assigned to escort Kathy out of the house, Lester casually keeps tabs on her thereafter, his gestures of help soon developing into sympathy and, inevitably, passion. In the meantime, she’s completely at loose ends, sleeping in her old car, her property in storage, her life in tatters.īut kindness from a stranger comes in the handsome form of Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard). Kathy tries to rectify things through a legal aid attorney (Frances Fisher), but Behrani already has title to the house and in the end she will have to sue the county over the blunder before she can reclaim what’s rightfully hers. The whole affair has been a mistake there had never been a business operated on the premises, and the amount in question is only $500.īut Kathy, a beautiful but damaged former drug addict whose father died several months back and whose husband recently split, never bothered opening her mail and therefore missed all the warnings. The home he acquires, an attractively shabby bungalow in a woodsy suburban area, is one just lost by Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), who has been evicted over non-payment of business taxes. For Behrani, the scheme is motivated less by profiteering than by necessity, as he’s been working in humiliating jobs cleaning highways and behind the counter at a convenience store while supporting his long-suffering wife Nadi (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and teenage son Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout) in style in a luxurious San Francisco apartment.īy selling this first house, then perhaps a second and third, Behrani believes he can restore his family to the comforts it enjoyed under the shah before the ascendance of the “damn ayatollahs.” Having just successfully married off his beautiful daughter into a prosperous Iranian-American family, Behrani (Ben Kingsley) hatches a plan to buy a seized property at auction and turn it around quickly at a big gain. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former officer in the Shah of Iran’s air force who, as the story starts, identifies his best shot at giving his family a solid foothold in the United States after years of struggle to maintain respectability. Main loss, necessarily, is the distinctive first-person voice of Col. Films this deterministic and bleak don’t often get made in Hollywood these days, but right now there are three of them –“Mystic River,” “21 Grams” and this one, which could prompt speculation that perhaps only now is the public seeing the first significant group of post-9/11 movies.Īdaptation by Perelman and fellow first-time scribe Shawn Otto effectively telescopes the action of Dubus’ gripping novel, which alternates between the p.o.v.s of the two leading characters before expanding its perspective in the final stretch. ![]()
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