Junto Boys

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (A Movie Review)

Jennifer Connelly is depressed because her husband has left her. She lies in bed. We see that the dishes are piling up in the kitchen and the mail floods the area inside the front door. Her mother calls and she pretends that her husband is asleep next to her. She can’t get out of bed. A knock on the door and the slimy man arrives with a sheriff’s deputy to kick her out the house. Why? She didn’t pay her business taxes. What business? Exactly, she doesn’t own one, but that doesn’t keep the government lawyers from booting her out anyway.

Ben Kingsley is a former Colonel in the Iranian military. He’s dressed well at his daughter’s wedding. In fact, he lives in a pretty upscale San Francisco apartment. But all isn’t what it seems. Next we see Kingsley working at his construction job at day and a convenience store at night. He marks in a book the cost of a candy bar as he eats it. We assume this is his dinner. Kingsley sees a tax auction notice for a house and we learn the relationship between these two characters that will carry us through the film. Kingsley has been living in the fancy apartment so that his daughter could land a wealthy husband and she has. Now Ben wants to find a good investment house to get back on his feet. Connelly’s home is it.

The drama of the movie comes from these two people and their rightful claim to the property. In the production film, the director said that he was drawn to the material because there was no antagonist. Both the main characters were heroes and the victim of circumstance. That’s true if you ignore the government’s role in the whole debacle and I think that people have grown to do just that.

The government has the ability to arbitrarily take away everything you have and they pay no price for doing so. Bureaucrats are shielded from the liability of their personal actions, and therefore worry not when they make mistakes. Their mistake becomes your problem that you have to resolve before they take action against you. When you solve their problems by jumping through their hoops there is no reward other than having your life back. When you fail to solve their problems you lose things. In the course of the movie, the damage done goes further than the deed to a property, but it all started with some punk with power that made a mistake.

House of Sand and Fog may unintentionally be a perfectly libertarian movie.