SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS, THE

Rating: 3

Time in the Alan Rudolph universe doesn’t flow the same was as it does in the one that you and I inhabit. It lopes along, telescoping events and worrying little about the standard rules of pacing. This can be a good thing when it comes to examing the complexities of human interaction, as in AFTERGLOW, or a bad thing, as in BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. In his latest film, THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS, it’s used to advantage as we scrutinize the inner life of Dr. Dave, a dentist whose paranoia kicks into high gear once he notices that his wife is no longer interested in him.
Campbell Scott as Dr. Dave gives an understated performance as a man who may or may not be a cuckold. At least in the physical sense. Backstage on the night of his wife’s amateur opera performance, he glimpses her talking to a man. We and he see only the back of that man’s head, but the look on his wife’s face, glowing with a smile that is transcendent as she flicks her hair and receives a kiss on the cheek, tells the whole story of her emotional fidelity. This is where Rudolph is at his best, focusing in on faces and letting them fill in the back story, as in years of falling into a dull routine of the dentist practice they share and raising three difficult daughters, all under the age of 10. Suddenly, Dr. Dave starts to notice things about that routine, like how they have so little couple time, how he takes care of the kids and the house when wife Dr. Dana (Hope Davis) is AWOL on errands and paperwork that take more time than they should. Running parallel is Dr. Dave’s flights of morbid fancy showing Dr. Dana exploring the wilder shores of love each time she’s not where she should be. There are also the de rigeur flashbacks, showing how smitten Dr. Dave was with Dr. Dana when their love was new, and how they drifted apart culminating in the emblematic shot of them sitting in neighboring examining rooms, divided by a wall, looking just a bit lost and lonely yet only a foot apart. Dennis Leary as the dental patient from Hell stands in for Dr. Dave’s subconscious that’s finally clawing its way into his life. Playing the manifestation that only Dr. Dave can hear or see, Leary is the perfect choice, spewing vitriol as he offers a running commentary on family life and suggestions for action that are cruel and cruelly tempting. He also plays the trumpet during impromptu cabaret sequences that pepper Dr. Dave’s fevered imagination.
Which, unfortunately, is not the only externalization. Stomach problems plague the eldest daughter, the physical manifestation of the stress her parents’ unacknowledged tension is causing. That would be sufficient for the filmed version of Jane Smiley’s book, “The Age of Grief” on which this film is based, but the follow up, an orgy of regurgitation in which the entire family comes down with a flu that renders them weak, vulnerable, and weak-stomached, comes off as heavy-handed. We got the point the second time the barf bucket came out.
Davis has an enigmatic role as the long-suffering wife of an emotionally sterile man and children who prefer their father. This is strictly Dr. Dave’s point of view, forcing her to play each line, each emotion as an open question and Davis is more than up to the task with her ethereally delicate looks and earthy soul, she is a conundrum par excellence.
Eventually, tears are shed, teeth are pulled, truths are revealed. and Rudolph has succeeded in luring us in to a way of looking at time and life that is his alone. Would that it were more emotionally engrossing with its offbeat blend of farce and tragedy. The peculiar rhythm and viewpoint of THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS makes this more of an intellectual exercise than a melodrama, but one with its own chilly pleasures.