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Film Description
An honest but sympathetic look at the strains of modern marriage. David Hurst is a disillusioned small-time dentist who suspects his wife is having an affair after seeing her kiss a mystery man. Preferring to brood he begins to imagine conversations with an angry patient. As his grief leads to a variety of bizarre acts, violence never seems far away. Based on Jane Smiley's novel, The Age of Grief,
Two New York dentists (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis) have now been married with kids for so long that the cracks have started to show. She’s become obsessed with oper... more >
Two New York dentists (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis) have now been married with kids for so long that the cracks have started to show. She’s become obsessed with opera music, and he’s convinced she’s having an affair and has begun seeing one of his most troublesome patients (Denis Leary) everywhere, always a sign that something’s not right. (Leary is undergoing much the same experience himself in the current TV series Rescue Me.) The kids, meanwhile, have become needier and clingier than ever before.
The nuclear families in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty suffered total meltdowns, something at once dramatic but almost implausibly heightened. By contrast, Alan Rudolph’s The Secret Lives of Dentists - which qualifies as the best date movie for married couples the American cinema has produced in quite some while - takes the insider line, understanding that most relationships crumble in increments, worn down as if a tooth: Scott’s dentist pretends to be asleep when in bed with his wife; Davis keeps making slight adjustments to the time she’s coming home.
Astutely adapted from Jane Smiley’s “The Age of Grief” by the playwright Craig Lucas, Rudolph’s film lets just the right amount of quiet desperation enter the frame, mostly in the form of performers who retain your interest as human beings even when, as characters, they’re limited to tossing and turning in bed with a bad case of the sweats. (And there’s something to be said for any film employing Denis Leary as the hero’s conscience.)
Clear-eyed about the chores that have to be worked through, and the hard graft that needs to be put in, if the goal of the happy marriage is to be achieved, it’s an affirmation of family values, yes - but Rudolph, Smiley and Lucas take a more convincing route there. The most significant narrative event is not murder, or suicide, or an affair (as was the case with American Beauty), or the death of a child, or sexual swinging (as in The Ice Storm), but simply, and believably, what happens to one family slowly coming down with the flu.
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