Starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. Rated PG.

Is Benicio Del Toro Brad Pitt's Picture of Dorian Gray? Del Toro is like the portrait that keeps aging, and acting, while the other guy gets by on his looks. He's certainly at his craggy best here, and as Jerry Sunborne, a junkie ex-lawyer who is both rescued by and rescuer of a family in trouble he provides most of the reasons to see Things We Lost in the Fire.

Halle Berry is more predictable as Audrey Burke, a wealthy and annoyingly spoiled Seattle woman. Her world is rocked at the start of this sad tale shot in a very recognizable Vancouver by the sudden death of her doting, almost saintly husband (David Duchovny, as seen in gradually fewer flashbacks).

After waffling for a while, the plot settles on what happens when Audrey, in grief and confusion, asks Jerry to come to stay in the garage of her family's villa-style home. The space was recently renovated because of the fire of the title a metaphorical device intended to give the film novelistic gravity, although Allan Loeb's original script pretty much sticks to bland dialogue clichés and expected plot points about healing and closure.

What is more surprising is how this obviousness is supported by the style-heavy directorial choices of Denmark's Susanne Bier, in her English-language debut. How hard do you really need to work to get people to feel the loss of a loved one, or to sense the anguish of withdrawal from heroin addiction. It's alarming that Bier who gave us hard-hitting but much drier-toned stuff in Brothers and the recent After the Wedding thinks we need relentless close-ups, agitated hand-held cameras, manic jump cuts, sad Balkan music, and multiple screaming-and-crying scenes. Yet the characters and their connections remain vague and thinly drawn. (The movie also avoids confronting inherent sexual issues.)

Fortunately, Del Toro doesn't overprocess self-evident emotions, instead offering small surprises in this otherwise schematic work. It's worth mentioning that the kids who play Audrey's shell-shocked children, Alexis Llewellyn and Micah Berry (no relation to the star), aren't at all cloying. It says something odd about the film that it does difficult things well yet makes the easy parts hard to swallow.