Film Reviews

The Secret Lives of Dentists

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Directed: Alan Rudolf. Starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunney.

Preview:

In 1988, playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas was hired to adapt Jane Smiley's critically acclaimed novella The Age of Grief. The short novel - which is told by the internal monologue of middle-aged dentist who believes his wife is cheating on him - posed an obvious obstacle: how to make cinematic something that was essentially novelistic. Lucas's solution was to allow the main character to run off with his fantasy, as well as create a sort of fantasy alter ego that followed him about. The script was set to be directed by Norman Rene with Campbell Scott in the lead. But before the film could go into production, Rene died tragically. But for Scott the idea of the film was still very much alive. Years later he found producers for the job and they contacted Alan Rudolph as a new director. For Rudolph, the pleasure of the project was the absorbing way that the script caught the moral complexity of marriage. Here was a story about passivity, rather than action; of avoidance, rather than confrontation. The moment the main character David suspects his wife Dana, he goes to extreme to avoid dealing with it - his logic being that what we don't acknowledge we won't have to make a decision about.

Review by Previewer