El Vaquero

Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Doane Gregory Academy Award winners Benicio Del Toro (right) and Halle Berry (left) star as Jerry Sunborne and Audry Burke, two people brought together by tragedy, in "Thing We Lost in the Fire."

Denmark's Susanne Bier, who directed last year's Oscar-nominated, "After the Wedding" makes her English-language debut with "Things We Lost in the Fire," a film that while sometimes overly sentimental shines through with flashes of emotional honesty.


The script is by Allan Loeb, who makes his feature debut.


The film moves back and forth in time as it weaves a story of loss, grief and recovery.


At the core of the film are three people: Steven (David Duchovny), his wife Audrey (Halle Berry) and his friend since childhood Jerry (Benicio Del Toro). Audrey has always resented and never been able to understand her husband's friendship with Jerry. Steven is a successful designer/architect and Jerry's a longtime heroin addict.


The distance, in terms of lifestyles, between the two men keeps growing, but Steven maintains the friendship, offering support and occasional food and money. Audrey considers Steven's time with Jerry as time better spent with her or their two kids.


One night, Steven tries to break up a domestic fight on the street and he's shot and killed. Audrey and the family are devastated. Despite her feelings of resentment, Audrey invites Jerry to the funeral. His presence is oddly comforting. He is someone who knew Steven as well as she did and who feels his loss as deeply. Audrey offers Jerry their empty garage as a place to stay. This leads Jerry to form a friendship with the kids and to attempt to kick his drug habit. But the road ahead for both Jerry and Audrey proves rocky.


At one point Audrey bluntly tells Jerry that it should have been him was killed rather than Steven. Later, when Jerry helps one of the kids learn to dunk his head underwater, we expect Audrey to be thankful. But instead she rails against him because that was a milestone that Steven should have experienced.


Adding excellent acting and drama to the film is the casting of Benicio Del Toro. Del Toro is not a conventional leading man. Consider his performances in "The Usual Suspects," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Traffic." He has a knack for getting under the skin of a character and making those characters totally believable. He achieves this yet again with Jerry. He makes him sympathetic, despite his flaws. He's also good at observing. Del Toro is often content to be an observer in a scene or to silently react to what's going on. Yet in those silences he still conveys the internal life of his character. His performance as Jerry is one of the best of his career.

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