![]() Originally assigned to escort Kathy out of the house, Lester casually keeps tabs on her thereafter, his gestures of help soon developing into sympathy and, inevitably, passion. In the meantime, she’s completely at loose ends, sleeping in her old car, her property in storage, her life in tatters.īut kindness from a stranger comes in the handsome form of Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard). Kathy tries to rectify things through a legal aid attorney (Frances Fisher), but Behrani already has title to the house and in the end she will have to sue the county over the blunder before she can reclaim what’s rightfully hers. The whole affair has been a mistake there had never been a business operated on the premises, and the amount in question is only $500.īut Kathy, a beautiful but damaged former drug addict whose father died several months back and whose husband recently split, never bothered opening her mail and therefore missed all the warnings. The home he acquires, an attractively shabby bungalow in a woodsy suburban area, is one just lost by Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), who has been evicted over non-payment of business taxes. For Behrani, the scheme is motivated less by profiteering than by necessity, as he’s been working in humiliating jobs cleaning highways and behind the counter at a convenience store while supporting his long-suffering wife Nadi (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and teenage son Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout) in style in a luxurious San Francisco apartment.īy selling this first house, then perhaps a second and third, Behrani believes he can restore his family to the comforts it enjoyed under the shah before the ascendance of the “damn ayatollahs.” Having just successfully married off his beautiful daughter into a prosperous Iranian-American family, Behrani (Ben Kingsley) hatches a plan to buy a seized property at auction and turn it around quickly at a big gain. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former officer in the Shah of Iran’s air force who, as the story starts, identifies his best shot at giving his family a solid foothold in the United States after years of struggle to maintain respectability. Main loss, necessarily, is the distinctive first-person voice of Col. Even Connie admits he's in the right on the issue, but Behrani won't budge from his plan to fix up the place and sell it for a four-times profit.Films this deterministic and bleak don’t often get made in Hollywood these days, but right now there are three of them –“Mystic River,” “21 Grams” and this one, which could prompt speculation that perhaps only now is the public seeing the first significant group of post-9/11 movies.Īdaptation by Perelman and fellow first-time scribe Shawn Otto effectively telescopes the action of Dubus’ gripping novel, which alternates between the p.o.v.s of the two leading characters before expanding its perspective in the final stretch. Needless to say this does not sit well with Kathy. Behrani and his wife Naderah (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and son Esmail (Jonny Ahdout) move in and make themselves at home, because it is. And through heretofore unheard-of expedience, the government has yanked Kathy's home from her and resold it with frightening speed and efficiency. His plan is to buy a property on the cheap, at auction, fix it up and resell it for profit. But he maintains his dignity, changing into fine suits in between work and driving a Mercedes. Now he works days laying down asphalt and nights as a convenience store clerk. This is a man who once had seaside manors and all of the other perks of power. ![]() ![]() Enter former Iranian Air Force Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley). Of course, she could have avoided all of this if she'd just opened her mail, her lawyer Connie (Frances Fisher) points out. For a lousy $500 she's kicked out of the house. By failing to open her mail, she didn't realize the county had assessed a tax on it which she didn't pay. She works menial labor and doesn't bother to take care of her own home, which is falling into disrepair. Recovering alcoholic Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) is still in a depressed funk eight months after her husband walked out on her. Yet by his own personal and professional self-destruction, he takes down a bunch of lives in the process. ![]() Instead, it allows the whole situation to be thrown into utter chaos by a character whose name is buried in the credits.
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