Cheap The Secret Lives of Dentists (DVD) (Campbell Scott, Denis Leary, Hope Davis) (Alan Rudolph) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Secret Lives of Dentists

But is she?

Director Alan Rudolph manages to re-create the claustrophic nastiness in the Hurst marriage. This is a marriage that is stale with relentless underlying causes--boredom, predictability and the mundane details of their life together. Flashbacks show the excitement of their courtship, and David's delight in Dana. David is a very tightly wound character. As I watched him absorb more and more of the domestic chores, I began to think he was some sort of saint. And yet it soon becomes apparent that David's state of mind is far from healthy. He nurses buried resentments that explode into rages and fantasies involving Dana and the other man.

Denis Leary plays Slater--a particularly obnoxious patient who becomes David's alter ego. David loathes Slater, and yet obviously on some level David also admires Slater's unleashed and uninhibited temperament and his ability to say what he really feels. The creation of Slater as David's alter ego was brilliantly funny.

The film was absorbing until about 3/4s of the way through. At this point, the plot meandered all over the place. The intense focus of the plot deviated into silliness, and this detracted from the film's theme (and my rating). The film was worth watching for its depiction of the unhappy domestic life of a couple who should be happy. The three main actors (Davis, Scott and Leary) made the film worthwhile--in spite of the slight sidetracking of the plot into Disneyesque territory.

"The Secret Lives of Dentists" is based on the novella "The Age of Grief" written by Jane Smiley. I am not a fan of Smiley's novels, but her short stories and this novella are excellent-- displacedhuman

Quirky look at a family in crisis
Alan Rudolph has directed some very interesting, though little-known films over the last twenty years... In his latest, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Rudolph mostly succeeds in creating an offbeat comedy-drama about a husband and wife team of dentists. Campbell Scott and Hope Davis play Dave and Dana Hurst, who lead a fairly typical, if hectic upper middle class existence. In addition to being a dentist, Dana is an opera singer. They have three young girls, who take up a large part of their nonworking time. Much of the film, in fact, focuses on the daily challenges of a couple raising children. While this gets tedious at times (there is a twenty or so minute segment where we get to see the whole family throwing up as they suffer from flu), it manages to convey something, obvious as it is, that other movies tend to overlook. Namely, that whatever else may be going on in their lives, children take up a great deal of parents' time and energy. The conventional fabric of Dave's life starts to unravel when two unrelated incidents occur one day. First, he sees his wife in what appears to be a romantic embrace with another man. Secondly, he is harassed in public by an obnoxious disgruntled patient (Denis Leary, who is his usual wise-cracking self). From this point on, the movie turns surreal, as Leary becomes a walking hallucination in Dave's life, dispensing unwanted advice and providing comic relief from the otherwise heavy mood. The transitions between comedy and melodrama are sometimes rather sudden, but both work well in their own way, so the imbalance doesn't hurt the film. As in many of Rudolph's films, Secret Lives of Dentists uses a sharp focus to illuminate the small events in the lives of a few people. Everything takes place over the course of a few days, and not all that much actually happens. We mostly watch Dave's struggle to maintain his sanity while dealing with his conflicted feelings, such as love and anger towards his wife, devotion and impatience with his children. The film is slow paced, so if your movie attention span is short, it may not be for you. Yet I found it to be an original, funny and often touching look at a family trying to keep itself together.

Like a shot of novocaine
I don't mind if a film is slow-paced, so long as there is something of substance to grab me and hold my attention. The Secret Lives of Dentists is a forgettable trudge through middle-class family life and the mind of the dull and repressed dentist and dad, David Hurst, who is tormented by his unfaithful and distant wife and worn down by the demands his children make on him, even though he loves them all. Clumsy and awkward, the movie belabors the same points over and over again and slowly numbs your mind. Only one sequence of scenes stands out in memory - when the Hursts all come down with the flu and begin to vomit left and right. Great, I got the point that they were sick, but really, how much puke needs to fly in order to convey this fact?

If you want to see a great film that stars Hope Davis, watch About Schmidt. It's also a slow-paced film that deals with ordinary, everday subject matter; however, unlike The Secret Lives of Dentists, About Schmidt is moving and thoughtful and will linger in your mind for days after you watch it.