Review of House of Sand and Fog (2003) by Ryan R — 03 Mar 2008

I thought this was gonna be an OK movie. Its been in my Netflix queue for I don't know how long and I finally got around to watching it this past weekend. It came out back in '03 and Ben Kingsley was nominated for an Oscar, and I can see why. Wow, Ben Kingsley can turn himself into whatever character he wants. He really is one of the greatest actors of our time, and his performance in this movie turns transforms it from what coulda been a USA made-for-TV movie into a solid solid movie.

Here's the plot. A girl (Jennifer Connelly) loses her house in Northern California b/c the county made a mistake by charging her business taxes that she never owed. The county auctions off her house to an Iraninan family, and the head of the family (Ben Kingsley) is determined to flip the house for what its worth on the market, which is 4 times what he paid for it. The girl makes friends with a deputy, who gets a little too involved in her life and ends up leaving his own family. Then we see the Iranian family closer and realize that they are a regular family, they have their own insecurities about being immigrants and want a bright future for themselves, especially for their son. The girl wants to take her house back desperately, seeing as it was her inheritance from her father who passed away.

There are so many times during this movie where you really feel for the characters involved and wish you could offer a solution for what is happening to them. You can't believe that a problem that starts as a misunderstanding would lead to what it leads to. You can see the difference in cultures in the Americans (Jennifer Connolly and her deputy boyfriend) and the Iranian family. Everybody who sees this movie will probably have different solutions for how things could've been handled differently by both parties throughout this movie. I guess in retrospect, this movie is really about the American Dream and what we think it is, or how we think we're supposed to get there. Its about how apathetic we can become, or how desperately we can become in search for the American Dream. This movie kinda stays with you the day after, and that's why I'm writing this review.