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Secret Lives goes inside the boring bourgeoisie
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
There are no real secrets in The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Married couples grow apart over time. Parenthood is demanding. Professional success and outward appearances aren't enough to squelch the existential drone of uncertainty and loneliness and self-doubt.
Gee, call a press conference. Alert the media.
But that is the irony in the title of Alan Rudolph's film: There is nothing secret about the pain and dissatisfaction of life, no matter whose life it is. The Secret Lives of Dentists is one more chronicle of suburban angst and emotional frigidity, one more portrait of bourgeois dysfunction, one more cri de coeur from the repressed intellectual elite. Like American Beauty and The Ice Storm and a hundred more before them, it's a stew of denial and deception in the midst of affluence.
These stories tend to take place in the monied classes because that setting lets artists do battle with the prevailing myths of fulfillment through consumption; unhappy poor people don't make good psychological drama, because the audience (or at least the movie producers) assume that what's wrong with the characters is they just don't have enough money. But if the characters are well-off and successful and still unhappy, then obviously there are Real Problems.
Rudolph doesn't exactly bring anything new to this party. His protagonists—a pair of married dentists, Dave and Dana Hurst (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, who are both very good)—aren't particularly more interesting or insightful than any number of other doubt-plagued professionals across the cultural landscape. But the movie works, despite an unfortunate veneer of high-mindedness. It works because the Hursts are absurd people, and Rudolph lets them be absurd. He doesn't hide their idiocies or selfishness, but he doesn't pretend to be horrified by them either.
He's an interesting and underappreciated director, Alan Rudolph. He specializes in a kind of dour humanism that probes human weaknesses without exploiting them. His characters, whether they're the talk-radio love triangle of Choose Me or the neon-lit losers of Trouble in Mind or the boozy bitches' warren of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, generally appear with their flaws and cracks fully exposed.
That's certainly true of the dentists. The film begins with a voice-over in which Dave Hurst ponders the lasting power of teeth, the way they survive fire and rot and fatal car accidents. Obviously a man obsessing over skeletal remains has some, uh, issues, right? It's not hard to see why. Even though he and his wife have offices in the same joint practice, they catch only quick glimpses of each other. He takes the morning patients, she takes the afternoons, and between them they juggle three kids and two houses (the house "in the country" for weekends).
"I am 38 years old, and I think I have reached the Age of Grief," Dave says to himself (The Age of Grief is the title of the Jane Smiley novella that the movie is adapted from). He has flashbacks to his and his wife's college romance, their youthful recklessness, etc. He wonders how he got from there to where he is now, and why he isn't happier. It suddenly occurs to him one day that his wife might be having an affair. But he doesn't say anything to her about it. So he withdraws farther and farther. In my favorite scene, he waits outside for Dana to come home one night, hours late. But when she finally pulls up in a taxi, he runs to the backyard and hides from her.
The characters are myopic and frightened enough to be pretty dull company, which is why Rudolph loads up the film with fantasy sequences, fevered imaginings and the occasional song and dance number. Most especially, he loads up the film with Denis Leary as an obnoxious dental patient, a rumpled trumpet player who's been thrown out by his wife. He resurfaces frequently as Dave's imaginary alter-ego, representing all the options David gave up. The net effect is that Leary provides a sardonic running commentary throughout. It made me think more movies should include a Denis Leary option. He leavens the story's potential leadenness, veering between ridicule and affection as he prods Dave to do something.
It's a smart vehicle for Leary, who only occasionally finds a role that lets him flex the full range of his acerbic fatalism. And Rudolph incorporates him smoothly, using the contrast between his ironic patter and Scott and Davis' textured realism to illuminate the story from several angles at once. It feels gimmicky sometimes, and you start to get the feeling Rudolph is going for more breadth than depth. But it keeps the movie lively and brings it inside Dave Hurst's own muddled mind.
By the end, I cared more than I expected to about the characters. For all their dreariness and fumbling, they emerge as sympathetic and complicated. Unlike, say, Neil LaBute and Darren Aronofsky, Rudolph is not fueled by contempt. Like Dave Hurst, he's detached but he still cares—and like Dave Hurst, he reminds you of it by the end of the movie.
September 4, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 36
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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