Since winning a Best Actress Oscar for 2001's Monster's Ball, Halle Berry has specialized in high-concept idiocy like Gothika, Perfect Stranger, and most notoriously, Catwoman. So while it's refreshing to see her tackling a heavy dramatic role again in the somber new drama Things We Lost In The Fire, it's hard not to experience a distinct sense of déjà vu as she once again plays a bereft widow struggling to emerge from the long shadow of her husband's death. But where Monster's Ball went for pummeling working-class intensity, Fire opts for a more upscale form of griefsploitation. Here, Berry is gorgeous 'n' grieving instead of ragged and raw, but the Oscar-baiting emotions remain the same.
Benicio Del Toro co-stars as a recovering drug addict who moves in with Berry and her children and struggles to turn his wasted life around after the death of her husband and his best friend, David Duchovny. Together, Del Toro and Berry forge a bond rooted in grief and loneliness, but filled with tricky undercurrents. Berry isn't the only Oscar favorite repeating an acclaimed role: Del Toro's tormented lost soul seems to have wandered in from 21 Grams, another moody drama about the interconnected agonies of haunted souls. The film's persistent echoes of Monster's Ball and 21 Grams continually pull viewers out of the story and toward the leads' past triumphs.
Even more problematically, Duchovny emerges as little more than a cardboard saint, a beneficent exemplar of kindness and compassion who could definitely use some humanizing touches. Doesn't the guy at least jaywalk? At one point, Berry even gets irritated with Duchovny for being too loving and supportive. He dies a hero's death, though the film unwittingly suggests that he didn't have to die to qualify as an angel. Well-acted yet strangely inert, Fire explores the messy human emotions of grief, but it'd be a lot more resonant if the guy everyone's mourning weren't so fatally perfect, so unforgivably superhuman.