Things We Lost in the Fire opens during a funeral. There are many people walking around the home, but there is one figure that appears to be out of place. That person is Jerry (Benicio Del Toro). He is disheveled and keeps primarily to himself. He has a desire to be there, but feels cut off from the rest. In particular, Audrey Burke (Halle Berry), the grieving widow whose home we are in.
Following the funeral, Audrey is having trouble dealing with the loss of her husband. Not hard to believe, losing the love of your life has to be an absolutely horrible experience to live through, much less get past. Seemingly as a way of trying to deal, she surprises herself by inviting Jerry to move into the room next to the garage. I am guessing that she is seeking to supplant Steven's Good Samaritan nature with regards to his long time friend.
Jerry moves in and works on getting himself clean, with a little help from a friendly neighbor (John Carroll Lynch) and Audrey and Steven's children, Dory and Harper (Micah Berry and Alexis Llewllyn, respectively). The impetus for this latest attempt at cleanliness was the death of Steven, his only friend, the only person to not give up on him.
The surface of the story is fairly simple. What is difficult is the emotional minefield that the two leads must traverse in order to simply survive their respective ordeals. The problem is that it is such a downer that I had a hard time breaking into the material. It is brutally honest. The issues are not sugar coated, they are scabs ripped open and exposed to burning antiseptic that is poured over them only to have the scabs ripped away again.
As for the reasons why I did not like the movie, well they can all be targeted at the creative team. There was an annoying self aware, Lifetime movie quality that bothered me. Drugs are bad, it is tough to lose a loved one, look at me, I can make you feel bad. Combine that with the extreme overuse of extreme close-ups. How many eyeballs do we need to look at? Shots of sad eyes (and various other parts) are shown to file nearly the entire frame. I found it to be very annoying and only exist to service the director's desires rather than the service of the story.
Bottomline. These close-ups and self-aware aura permeated the majority of the film. At times I longed for it to be over, but only after Benicio's next scene. I have to rank the experience as a frustrating one. Strong performances and raw emotion competing with "look at me" direction. I can only recommend this if you want to feel bad while staring at Halle's eyeball on a number of occasions.
Mildly Recommended.
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