Paranoia, parenting and plaque.
You might think the title The Secret Lives of Dentists is too hip for the room. It sounds like a the name of a long-lost Frank Zappa album, and seems to promise yet another familiar portrait of suburban dysfunction designed to give hip urban art-house crowds yet another subject they can feel superior to. But don't let the title fool you. Although it thankfully avoids sentiment at every turn, Dentists is one of the warmest and most sincere adult dramas you've seen?a tale of two married dentists and their children that's attuned to the rhythms of marriage and family life, and respects both deeply without shrouding them in phony Hollywood holiness.
Director Alan Rudolph (Afterglow) and screenwriter Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) are adapting a novella by Jane Smiley that had the somewhat more Jamesian title The Age of Grief, about a dentist and suburban daddy whose life was consumed by the suspicion that his wife was having an affair. The new title suggests the story will see the dentist more as the world might see him, and less as he might see himself. There are times when the movie's distancing devices seem to go too far, ripping you out of subtle, involving scenes you'd rather bask in. But there's so much great stuff here, I'm inclined to write off the things I didn't like as a matter of personal taste. Rudolph and Lucas understand not just the basic human issues of two crucial institutions, marriage, and parenting, but their textures as well.
Campbell Scott plays hero Dave Hurst, a trim, mustachioed, 38-year-old dentist; Hope Davis is his wife and business partner, Dana, a dentist with a part-time alternate life as an amateur opera singer. (Davis is superb here, always playing Dana a shade cooler and more opaque than you'd expect.) An early scene shows Dave backstage at a production that features his wife in a chorus part; he's there to deliver her forgotten good-luck charm, a rabbit's foot. He sees her from afar, her lovely face framed by the doorway of a dressing room, talking to a man whose face Dave cannot see. In preceding scenes, the Hurst marriage already seemed a bit strained, but in a perfectly ordinary way; if there were communication problems, they probably stemmed from the perfectly ordinary pressures of raising kids, earning a living, and trying to keep a love story going after a decade or more.
But this moment?one that might or might not exist only in the hero's paranoid brain?seems more important somehow, perhaps pivotal, and Dave will become obsessed with it. Though wordless, this moment has the same effect on the plot of Dentists that Nicole Kidman's infidelity-fantasy monologue had on the plot of Eyes Wide Shut, a deeply misunderstood movie that wasn't really a sex picture at all, but a psychological drama about a man's resistance to domesticity and his fear of his wife's sexual hunger. The backstage spying scene kick-starts the hero's anxieties, which will snowball into real despair and affect his wife and kids.
Soon enough, poor Dave is a borderline wreck, fearing the worst whenever Dana goes anyplace without him; he begins distancing himself from Dana, seizing every excuse to cut their conversations short or rebuff her awkward attempts to get close to him. His behavior is irrational, and even if it's based on real things?Dana does seem alternately cold and furtive at times?his passive-aggressive manner makes everything worse. It's as if Dave secretly wishes the marriage would disintegrate, and there are times when his quiet competence and refusal to seek praise seem the ultimate evolution of male vanity. When he dotes on his three daughters?one of whom refuses to interact with Dana, for unexplained reasons?Dave sometimes seems to be twisting the knife, playing Good Dad to make his wife feel like Bad Mom.
Like Eyes Wide Shut?but smaller and more readily accessible?Dentists envisions marriage as a shared piece of emotional property that must be maintained by both parties to prevent deterioration. The Hursts don't realize it, but they've failed to do basic maintenance, and now their house is falling apart. This idea is expressed verbally and visually throughout Dentists, both in the hero's monologues about his profession ("Life is what destroys teeth," he announces) and in a number of seemingly innocuous but quite important actions (Dave treats the discovery of moldy food in the fridge as a chance to tell his kids about decay).
Those who expect the movie to blame one spouse or the other for the marriage's problems will be disappointed. Rudolph would rather observe behavior than wag fingers. Still, there's a fine undercurrent of unease in Dentists?a sense that something momentous and horrible is lurking just around the next bend. Rudolph visually introduces this idea in the backstage scene with Dave observing Dana's supposed interaction with the unknown lover: He shoots both Dave and his view of Dana with zoom lenses, from some distance away so that space is compressed, and the shadows of bystanders briefly but literally engulf both of them. This visual motif?darkness briefly engulfing beauty?recurs throughout. The most obvious example is a long shot of the Hurst house seen from outdoors at night, which begins in blackness?a tree in the foreground, perhaps?then moves to reveal the window-framed silhouette of Dave doing the please-sleep-baby dance with his youngest, a toddler aged daughter. The drama moves inside the house briefly, then jumps back outside, concluding as it began, but in reverse?with the blackness once again swallowing the house.
There are so many expert touches that Rudolph and Lucas' missteps seem all the more flagrant. Surely there was a better way to visualize Dave's id?his inner teenage punk?than by casting Denis Leary as a disgruntled jazz trumpeter patient who invades Dave's mind and follows him around, much as Brad Pitt does with Ed Norton in Fight Club. (At one point, Dave goes for an angry spin on a riding mower while Leary literally rides shotgun, firing a rifle into the air. This stuff is so faux-surreal that it verges on Ally McBeal territory, while a couple of fourth-wall-breaking gags are like something out of Mel Brooks. When Dave's whole family is suffering from fever?a too overt metaphor for the "sickness" overtaking them?the soundtrack plays the Peggy Lee hit "Fever" twice, the second time with Dave's Rita Hayworth-like assistant (Robin Tunney) warble the tune while Leary plays along on trumpet. (It's as if Rudolph doesn't trust his own emotional reach and can't resist undercutting it with a joke; he's like a burly guy who hugs you tight and says, "I love you," then adds, "even though you smell funny.")
But when a movie aims as high as this one, and hits so many targets dead-on, you can forgive a lot. Scott's performance is the movie's biggest creative insurance policy. It's amazing?as rich and surprising as his work in Roger Dodger but arguably more difficult because the character is so much smaller and quieter. The only thing he's done that comes close is his work as Hamlet in the made-for-tv movie he co-directed three years ago. It occurs to me that Scott has built his career with immense integrity. No, he never quite found his way onto the Hollywood "A" list, but he's appeared in quite a few movies worth watching twice. How many top male stars can say the same?