Review – The House of Sand and Fog

This movie falls flat on so many levels. The first problem was the almost complete lack of sympathetic characters. The main plot is a conflict between an unstable woman (Jennifer Connelly) wrongly evicted from her house and an Iranian expatriate (Ben Kingsley) and his family who buy the house from the county and move in. Both the key characters are too petty and mean to evoke much feeling for either. Further, the story rests on an annoying legal error: anyone who’s ever tried to buy a house knows that the mere presence of a lawsuit filed against the legitimacy of a deed is enough to frighten away almost any potential buyer, so Kingsley’s character would in the real world have almost no ability to turn a profit by reselling the property. But the thing that really killed it for me was that every time things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, they did. By the end (actually considerably in advance of the end) the tragedy was being laid on so thick that it turned into a farce. The result was a lot of pretty cinematography slapped on top of something with all the emotional content of the “Gloom, despair and agony on me” sketch from Hee Haw. See if desperate