'Things We Lost In The Fire' (R)(out of four)

The pain of "Things We Lost In The Fire" is as dense as the music piped into the headphones that heroin addict Jerry Sunborne uses to drown out the misery that drugs have brought him.

Nonetheless, spending two hours with the characters in "Fire" is cathartic, a cleansing for anything that troubles the soul. With each peeling away of the layers in Susanne Bier's heartfelt film, something new is recognized. For Audrey Burke (Halle Berry), it's the pain of the loss of her husband, Brian (David Duchovny), and how in the grand scheme of things, the little annoyances of life mean less when there are more important things to grieve. For Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), the losses that drugs have heaped on him, including his law career and his health, are becoming insurmountable. For Audrey's children, Harper (Alexis Llewellyn) and Dory (the very cute Micah Nicolas Berry), anger and confusion accompany the loss of their father.

For anyone who has experienced grief, "Things We Lost In The Fire" presents a chance to focus on another's tragedy to realize the scope of his or her own.

The watchful eye of Bier's direction zooms in on eyes, hands, wedding bands and the fluorescent green of pool water, giving the audience the lens to see inside the souls of the characters.

The movie opens with the family getting ready for a funeral. Suddenly, someone is gone. How were they lost? In a fire? Some other way? In the beginning, it doesn't matter, because Bier thrusts you into Audrey's life. She has to make arrangements, entertain family members, contact people from an address book. She sends her brother to fetch her late husband's friend, Jerry, who has always been one of the little annoyances in life. He lives in the seedier side of Seattle in a building littered with drug addicts. Yet, it's the same man who caused bickering between Audrey and Brian who becomes the reason for the widow to continue when nothing else seems to matter.

She invites Jerry to live in an extra area of the house and substitutes her hurt for his, sometimes even taking out her own pain on him. "It should have been you, Jerry," she says to him. But in the next breath, she's inviting him to share her bed, not for sex, but to help her get some much needed sleep.

Bier allows her actors to exist in their own space, never rushing emotions, and while some may criticize her pacing as slow, moviegoers are best served to allow themselves to become immersed in the prodding restlessness.

The movie and its actors are definitely Oscar worthy (if you want to be in the know come February, you better catch this flick.) As Jerry, Del Toro never falls victim to "playing" the addict; he is the addict. Even the genial neighbor and supporting cast member (John Carroll Lynch) has real emotion in what the loss of Brian does to him, including making him see his own wife for what she is. As for Berry, she allows Audrey to ride the roller coaster of the stages of grieving: anger, denial, panic, guilt, shock. It's no longer Halle Berry, the stunning beauty, but Audrey who Berry lets the audience experience.

Danish-director and producer Bier has created a stunning film for her first English-language picture. She proves that when it comes to loss and love, everyone speaks the same language.