THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS (Alan Rudolph, 2003) 53

Reviewed: February 10th, 2003

This is a movie made by a writer and a director as cowardly as Campbell Scott's taciturn protagonist. What wants to be an incisive examination of the small cracks that eventually widen and sometimes swallow marriages (work; kids; suspicion; affairs; self-doubt; silence) ends up devolving into a casual and repetitive look at married life that cinema has already seen done better. The flaws leading to this movie's derailment are pronounced; first off is the problematic premise itself. Campbell Scott suspects wife Hope Davis of having an affair (suspects is putting it lightly; there's pretty definitive evidence) but is too craven to ever confront her because he believes that conversation would mark the official beginning of the end. This is a fine starting point for a picture, an idea which could successfully comprise, say, the first act or first act and a half of a film. Unfortunately here that premise is stretched across the entire film, and the result is that The Secret Lives of Dentists is just as closed off and hesitant as its protagonist. No effort is ever made to dig deeper and really stare at the underlying realities of the situation; that is, how the cracks widened, why the cracks widened, who are these people in the first place? I'm all for ambiguity and obtuseness in cinema but not when it comes at the expense of insight or characterization. It sure doesn't help matters that Campbell Scott -- who was so brilliant last year in Roger Dodger -- never lets any direly needed humanity into his Dentists performance. This is a categorically inward man, yes, but we still need to see that glimmer of a soul -- a soul that has probably been deadened by a decade of wailing children and a monotonous routine and little sleep and no time for the self -- but a trace of which must still occasionally peek through. During the whole movie I couldn't help but think of how Campbell's father, the unrivaled George C. Scott, would have played the role. He essentially did play the role in Richard Lester's Petulia (one of the greatest of all films): a closed-off doctor, with young kids, in the midst of marital strife (he's just gotten divorced). Comparing his performance to his son's here is immensely illustrative of how Scott Jr. faltered. Scott Jr. plays his dentist like a single-emotion robot, so the question becomes not why Hope Davis is dissatisfied with him, but why she even married him in the first place. Scott Sr., on the other hand, plays his doctor like a human, so that when Julie Christie tells him she's trying to save his life we don't question whether he's even alive.

Massively compounding these problems is a truly horrific conceit: Dennis Leary as Tyler Durden. I couldn't help but burst out laughing when someone asked Alan Rudolph at the Q&A I attended to compare Leary's character to Durden and Rudolph had the balls to shrug his shoulders, look confused, and upon further inquiry say he's never seen "The Fight Club" and he never plans on watching it. Not only does Leary literally play the same exact role Pitt does in Fight Club (id in human form who has materialized to direct the other side of his brain to the wild side of life), but he also dresses and looks the same exact fucking way (brown leather coat; multicolored, collared, button-down t-shirt; big amber sunglasses; fashionably tussled hair). His character is a disastrous miscalculation, a creation which single-handedly nearly ruins the whole film because he's nothing more than a pathetic and desperate attempt to inject humor into scenes that absolutely do not require nor desire it. Pounds of potential emotion come to be negated by the cheap, surreal Leary yuks. No more glaring is this error than in the (at first) touching moment when Campbell Scott is massaging Hope Davis's foot, says "I'm sorry I'm me" (great line) and then starts crying (also the only moment when the aforementioned soul threatens to present itself). Too bad then that one second later Leary pops out from under Campbell's bed and utters (with his de facto repulsed scowl): "You're crying?!" The other grievous Leary offense (although all his screentime is pretty fucking grievous) comes in the film's final confrontation between Davis and Scott, a (wanna/wouldbe) powerful scene if not for the fact Rudolph cuts to Dennis Leary's face throughout the sequence (like he's prepared to crack a joke or like we give a shit what fake Leary thinks of what's going on).

The Secret Lives of Dentists is the kind of movie which has the requisite scene where Scott complains that he went to college, dentist school, took out loans and saved money for this? as if everyone in the audience has never seen a movie or read a book which dares to posit that -- ::gasp:: -- marriage is not the sun-drenched-drinking-pina-colatas-on-the-sand-while-being-massaged-by-naked-beautiful-women-nightly-in-utopian-paradise no one of sound mind has ever thought it was in the first place. Like I mentioned, there's some excellent dialogue here ("remember when the years were long?" asks Davis), but more often screenwriter Craig Lucas falls back upon the stock sentiments in the Married Life Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be guidebook without ever probing much deeper than an entirely superficial glance (Scott's suspicions manifest themselves as fantasies in which Davis has a manage a toi with random men, which might be affecting if Rudolph didn't continually undermine the effect with horribly cheesy music [a constant in Dentists] intended to make us guffaw at Scott's bombastic, internal embellishments as opposed to actually empathizing with them). Virtually the entire second half of Dentists is an extended sequence where the whole family is sick with the flu (physical manifestation of their dysfunctional dynamic; get it? get it? get it?), yet Davis and Scott don't talk to each other. Get it? They're distant... so they don't speak. They're distant... so they don't speak. They're distant... so they don't speak. They're distant... so- yeah you probably understood the first time, right? Begin Spoiler. Meanwhile, the ending -- which tries to achieve the most desirable of all movie ending attributes = tentative optimism -- came off to me as nothing but a cop-out. Scott's too afraid to confront any of his marital problems (and so is this movie) but in the end his reluctance is absurdly rewarded. Temporary placidity is restored, cut to: final Scott voice-over comparing teeth to marriage, cut to end credits scroll. Though Rudolph and his movie tries to fool you otherwise (and yes, I can confirm Rudolph really is erroneously convinced that the ending of his movie is happy since he said as much point blank at the Q&A), in reality, optimism is nowhere to be found. It's an empty, undeserved, sour ending which resolves nothing besides that the cycle will repeat itself as early as next week. End Spoiler. And so then I ask what was the point? The Secret Lives of Dentists' promising first act led me to believe I'd experience a profoundly honest movie which sketches how the collapse of a marriage can spiral from the most trivial of things (and perhaps, or perhaps not, then be restored). Instead I got a movie which never satisfactorily follows through on its own convictions.

Return home.