Review
THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS
Starring Campbell Scott and Hope Davis
Directed by Alan Rudolph
Opens Friday, November 28
Globe Theatre
Campbell Scott plays Dave Hurst, a dentist with a moustache, married to another dentist, Dana (Hope Davis). After 10 years of marriage, they have a successful dental practice, three daughters, a rambling family home and a holiday house. Backstage at a local opera production, Dave witnesses a moment of intimacy between his wife and an unknown man. Retreating from the situation, he questions himself and his values as he struggles to find an honourable response, balancing his love of his family with his own self respect.
Within the first 10 minutes, the film crisply establishes what we need to know about the Hurst family. Gathered around the dinner table, Dana passionately tries to impart some of the beauty of the role she’s singing in a local opera production and is dismayed at the lack of interest from her family. Davis’s hurt expression, as her character realizes the collective conversation has moved on and excluded her, perfectly captures the private longing for experiences beyond her family.
Dave’s secret life is brought into being when he faces the prospect that his marriage may not be the rock he thought it was. Carefully attempting to maintain a viable facade of family life, he quietly and internally reels between anger at his wife and the belief that somehow he is to blame. Suddenly, in the film’s weakest conceit, an obstreperous patient, Slater (Dennis Leary), begins making imagined appearances in the passenger seat of Dave’s car and at the family table, articulating the darker elements of Dave’s ruminations. Slater is apparently everything Dave is not: forthright, decisive, rude and even violent, and his presence introduces the possibility that quiet, cautious Dave just might lash out in unexpected ways.
The Secret Lives of Dentists is a story of a marriage and the domestic apparatus that accompanies it, revealing unglamorous but ultimately affectionate reality in settings of work, home, a holiday house and family cars. The props are grocery bags, thermometers and vomit buckets. The frame is kept tightly on domestic minutiae, full of intimate detail with almost no vacant space. Every wall is full of children’s paintings, every surface is covered with the detritus of family life.
Dentists captures the elusive intimacies of a real relationship, like the casual collusion between parents. "You have to pretend you’ve had this all along" Dave says to his wife after her opera performance, as he slips a rabbit’s foot charm into her hand. Without missing a beat, Dana seamlessly displays it to their children as the source of her success. The film is just as effective at capturing the breakdown of communication and the corrosive effects of suspicion between a couple in crisis after 10 years of marriage. The beautifully modulated rhythms of trivial talk, silences and argument draw us in, fascinated, into a world of surprising drama.
This is a delicately rendered miniature of a marriage, exploring its complexities and paradoxes in an honest funny and moving film |
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