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No matter how you slice the suds, it’s still soap, not Greek tragedy. That’s true of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s pseudo-arty 21 Grams, it’s true of Anthony Minghella’s pseudo-epic Cold Mountain, and it’s true of first-time director Vadim Perelman’s just plain awful adaptation of Andre Dubus III’s Oprah book-club selection, House of Sand and Fog. Like Russell Banks in Continental Drift, Dubus takes the points of view of a blue-collar American and a foreign immigrant as their lives collide with catastrophic results. Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly, joining Nicole Kidman, Sarah Polley, Charlotte Rampling, and Scarlett Johansson in the ranks of cinema’s celebrity cleaning ladies) is a recovering substance abuser who’s lost her husband and now is about to lose her house because she neglected to look into the mail piling up on her floor. Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), a former top-ranker in the toppled shah’s military, has been trying to rebuild his and his family’s life in America, and he sees buying Nicolo’s home dirt-cheap at auction as a key first step. Neither character seems especially sympathetic (that’s the point of Dubus’s first-person narrations), only flawed and human, but Perelman’s miscasting makes sure they come off as glamorized stereotypes. Kingsley, in particular, deserves some kind of award for his embarrassing 10-minute tirade near the end of the film, whose plot includes three suicide attempts. Roger Deakins’s cinematography contributes the only subtle element; he artfully re-creates the fog, but what’s needed is a lot more sand. (126 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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