Del Toro is the actor that should have taken home the Oscar for the role of Jerry Sunborne.
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Snubbed. Benicio del Toro was completely snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the 2007 Academy Awards. His performance should have been an odds-on favorite to take home the coveted Oscar for Best Actor, but the incredibly talented actor didn´t receive as much as a nomination from the Academy. I´ve seen all of the performances that contained Best Actor nominated performances and don´t feel that any of them came close to the work done by del Toro in portraying a caring man saddled with a heavy burden of drug addiction and the loss of his best friend; the only man who cared much of anything for him. This was the finest performance of the year and I´m just amazed that Benicio del Toro was snubbed.
"Things We Lost in the Fire" is the story of Audrey Burke (Halle Berry) who loses her caring husband Brian (David Duchovney) when he is killed trying to help a woman who is being beaten by her husband. Audrey is left alone to raise her children Harper (Alexis Llewellyn) and Dory (Micah Berry). She is in shock at the sudden death of her husband and finds herself turning to a person she has loathed for years; Jerry Sunborne (Benicio del Toro), a former lawyer who has been Brian´s best friend since the second grade, but has become a drug addict with no job or apparent future. Audrey nearly forgot to contact Jerry about Brian´s death, but sent her brother Neal (Omar Benson Miller) to fetch Jerry on the day of the funeral.
Jerry is given a place to stay by Audrey in a spare room in the garage. He had been staying at a drug rehab center and was doing odd chores to earn his stay, but Audrey makes him a better offer and Jerry finds himself wondering why Audrey has allowed him to stay on the property of his best friend. During his stay at the Burke household, Jerry becomes a friend and fatherly figure to ten year old daughter Harper and six year old son Dory. Audrey finds some solace to her pain in companionship with Jerry and goes as far as having him hold her so she can fall asleep. He also befriends Brian´s friend Howard Glassman (John Carroll Lynch) and Howard shows interest in helping Jerry become a better man by offering up exercise and a vocation.
The new world provided to Jerry is fragile as Audrey is uneasy about Jerry´s past and his closeness to her two children. Jerry is able to help Dory get over his fear of putting his head under water and knows secrets about the children that Brian had shared with him, but never revealed to his wife. She is quick to lose her temper towards Jerry and throws him out of the garage after one incident regarding Harper. With this new lifestyle being something cherished by Jerry, he quickly falls back to his heroin addiction and Audrey realizes her folly and has Neal and one of Jerry´s fellow Narcotics Anonymous attendees Kelly (Alison Lohman) help Jerry become clean again and solidify his position as a dear and close friend of the Burke family.
"Things We Lost in the Fire" is an emotionally charged film that succeeds mainly because of the strength of its two primary actors, del Toro and Berry. I have long admired del Toro´s acting abilities and this film allows his expressive eyes and ability to convey emotion to command a film like few actors in Hollywood can do today. Brad Pitt is about the only other actor I can think of that can show the amount of emotion in his eyes like del Toro can and the extreme close ups utilized by director Susanne Bier put del Toro´s expressive eyes front and center. Both actors have won Academy Awards for past performances and "Things We Lost in the Fire" certainly benefits from their involvement. Berry is very strong as a woman in shock who must remain strong after the loss of her husband and while she isn´t as impressive as she was in "Monster´s Ball," Berry is still one of today´s best actresses.
The story by Allan Loeb feels emotionally contrived at times. "Things We Lost in the Fire" is a film about emotional redemption and the need to be loved and supported by others. It is a film that shows the more depressing occurrences in life and spends considerable amount of time showing a man riddled with drug dependency going through pure hell as he relapses. The actors bring honesty to these emotions, but Loeb´s story continually forces emotional moments towards the audience in a manner which has the audience feeling manipulated. It is one thing to sit through a film with its emotional downs, but "Things We Lost in the Fire" is a film with very few ´ups´ that help counterbalance the depression and Loeb tries too hard to try and force the audience into feeling sadness over two characters in unfortunate situations. It´s not a bad story, but it tries way too hard into making us feel depressed over what occurs on-screen instead of finding our own emotional response to the story.
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