Film review: 'Secret Lives of Dentists'
By Steve Sailer
UPI National Correspondent
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LOS ANGELES, July 31 (UPI) -- "How can they afford that place?"

How often have you asked yourself that while gaping at the sheer square
footage of the homes used in movies and TV shows? Imagine how these vast
apartments
and suburban homes with fifty-foot wide living rooms must engender envy and
resentment in foreign viewers who assume Americans actually live like that.

Compounding the unreality is the tidy emptiness of these supposedly modern
American homes. Where's the surly profusion of possessions that litters real
rooms in this Age of Costco? We almost never see on screen that hallmark of 21st
Century household futility: the living room clogged with perpetually
half-assembled closet organizers and modular storage systems.

Refreshingly, in the "The Secret Lives of Dentists," an indie infidelity
drama with an unrepresentatively comic name, Allan Rudolph, the veteran art
house
director of Robert Altman-style ensemble films (such as 1984's charming
"Choose Me"), shows us real estate reality.

A married couple, both dentists, and their three little girls dwell in what
appears to be a quite nice 2,500 sq. ft. four bedroom house stuffed with all
the teeming paraphernalia of upper middle class family life.

The result, though, is a cluttered, even claustrophobic-looking movie. There
is, it turns out, a fundamental reason why filmmakers rent huge houses and
then knock down walls to allow themselves even more expansive camera angles: the
bigger and blanker the stage, the more vividly the characters can stand out.

In "Dentists," the husband (played by Campbell Scott of "Rodger Dodger")
seems hemmed-in, his manliness encumbered by all the domestic trappings. Nor
does
it enhance what's left of his aura of masculinity that he and his wife (Hope
Davis, who was Jack Nicholson's daughter in "About Schmidt") are equal partners
in their dental firm, and that when they get home, he does half (or more) of
the housework. The audience, therefore, is less surprised than he is when he
glimpses his wife in the arms of another man, perhaps the director of the
amateur opera in which she's appearing as a slave girl.

Hoping the affair will peter out before he has to confront her with his
awareness, which might doom the marriage, he throws himself into the domestic
chores his wife is neglecting.

He lacks leverage. They are equal business partners, and she is the more
talented dentist, the one who would wind up with most of the patients if they
split. His only gesture of revenge is to invent an imaginary friend, played by
comedian Dennis Leary, who gives him cynical (but, sadly, not very funny)
advice.
(Leary could have improvised better lines than he got in the script.) But the
husband is too nice to take a swing at her or shoot his rival. And he cares
too much about his children to put them through a divorce.

"Dentists" contrasts sharply with another, far grander cuckoldry drama:
Adrian Lyne's lavishly staged "Unfaithful," for which Diane Lane earned a well
deserved Best Actress nomination last winter.

"Unfaithful" wasn't much more realistic than an opera. Lane's young lover, a
used book dealer, lived in a Manhattan apartment big enough to host full-court
basketball games, while the husband she betrayed was as handsome as Richard
Gere.

Still, while movies don't require all the exaggeration and abstraction that
operas do, they need some, especially if the script isn't particularly
realistic. Rudolph's attempt at filming an honest-looking story of upper-middle
adultery is a worthy experiment, but to make the movie worth attending he needed
an
equally hardheaded screenplay.

Instead, he got Craig Lucas adapting feminist novelist Jane Smiley's 1977
novella "The Age of Grief." Rudolph normally writes his own scripts, but Scott,
who owned the rights to the book, forced him to film unaltered his friend
Lucas's screenplay.

Judging from Lucas' best known credits (the AIDS drama "Longtime Companion"
and the gender-bender play "Prelude to a Kiss") and this tepid script, Lucas
might not have a lot of first hand insight into how a man would feel about his
woman cheating on him.

As so often happens in feminist-influenced movies, the words don't match the
pictures. Scott, who also produced, claimed that the wife falls for another
man because her husband is "uncommunicative," but his character hardly has any
time to communicate. While she's running around, he cooks all the meals and
cleans up all the messes, which only appears to make her more contemptuous of
him.

Instead, Rudolph's images subvert the script's conventional explanations with
a disturbing idea: the perfect equality of their marriage has sapped the
sexual energy from it. Because he has no power over her, she doesn't find him
exciting.

"The Secret Lives of Dentists" likewise suffers from an unstimulating
distribution of power -- too much is in the hands of Lucas and Scott and not
enough
in the hands of Rudolph and Leary.