First time director and co-screenwriter Vadim Perelman, himself a Russian èmigrè, reserves his genuine sympathy for the immigrant family, which upsets the balance of Andre Dubus II's original novel. Perelman shows no sense of humour or proportion, and the story veers out of control in its final hour, turning from character- driven drama into sensation-driven melodrama.
Towards the end, virtually none of the characters behaves with the slightest sense, and as a result the audience is more likely to giggle than sympathise.
The tragic characters are meant to be the Iranian family, but the film doesn't make us regard their downfall so much as a tragedy, as the culmination of many individual acts of silliness that could have been avoided. A film which should be deeply moving ends up as so deliberately grim and gloomy.
Perelman's excursions into arty symbolism are irksome, too, and don't get me started on James Horner's intrusive score (he also wrote the sub-Aaron Copland music for The Missing, which is slightly, but not much, more effective).
This man has a long history of ruining dramatic moments by over- emphasis; House Of Sand And Fog should be played to all other film composers as a horrible warning of what can happen when a writer of background music turns into a preposterous bighead.
