Things We Lost in the Fire is a melo­drama mod­eled after 21 Grams in almost every way: the story of a nuclear fam­ily shat­tered by a ran­dom death, told as a non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive, with con­spic­u­ously arty cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and costar­ring Beni­cio Del Toro.

Even a single-sentence descrip­tion of the basic plot con­veys how over­wrought things get: Audrey (Halle Berry) impul­sively takes in her dead hus­band Brian’s (David Duchovny) heroin-addicted friend Jerry (Beni­cio Del Toro). Audrey’s moti­va­tions are semi-consciously self­ish; she per­haps thinks that she can retain some con­nec­tion with her dead hus­band by indef­i­nitely extend­ing his fruit­less effort to help his child­hood friend to kick his drug habit.

This movie’s kind of a drag, don’t you think?

But unaware of the adage that one must beware what one asks for, she becomes resent­ful when her plan unex­pect­edly suc­ceeds. Jerry does in fact begin to kick drugs, a neigh­bor takes an implau­si­bly quick shine to him and offers him a job, he teaches one of her kids to swim (a task at which her hus­band had pre­vi­ously failed), and he responds to her flir­ta­tious advances.

Inex­plic­a­bly, the movie ends with the wrong Vel­vet Under­ground song; some­one chose “Sweet Jane” over “Heroin.” If the film­mak­ers thought it too obvi­ous, then how do you explain every­thing else in the movie?

Offi­cial movie site: www.thingswelostinthefire.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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