All is well with Dr. Dana Hurst, the character played by Hope Davis,
until she joins the chorus of a local production of Verdi's "Nabucco."
She is a dentist, in a lucrative partnership with her husband (Campbell
Scott), they have three adorable young daughters, several homes and even
more cars and SUVs.
During the "Nabucco" rehearsals, Davis (she of the tightest surgically
unaltered face in the movies) becomes obsessed with Verdi's music and,
consequently, with the idea of finding romance outside her idyllic home.
(The sequence is not as simple as that, but we have limited space here.)
That's the basic premise of Alan Rudolph's "The Secret Lives of Dentists,"
which premiered tonight at the opening of the 46th annual San Francisco
International Film Festival in the Castro Theater. The script is based
on Jane Smiley's novella, "The Age of Grief."
The film is entertaining, high-grade soap, with some funny scenes, and
this interesting observation by Davis, as she keeps singing and humming
a dramatic high point in "Nabucco" - "this could be a waltz and that's
what makes it so tragic."
On the downside, far too many close-ups of all-too-realistic dentistry.
Rudolph said in a brief appearance before the screening that "movies are all
that stand between us and reality," so what's with all that drilling and
poking and bleeding?
Bottom line on the film: the whole is way less than the sum of its parts.
Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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