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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
There's been some joking over the years about Ben Kingsley's availability as an all-purpose ethnic, ready to play any character requiring a little salt in his accent or a skin tone darker than lily white. But what's not always said is that Kingsley, who is half Indian, takes ethnic impersonation as little more than a starting point: his Gandhi was witty and resourceful as well as saintly, and he was both unsentimental and touching as a Polish Jew in "Schindler's List." In the well-made but despondent new "House of Sand and Fog," adapted from the novel by Andre Dubus III, Kingsley plays an Iranian colonel from the days of the Shah, a proud man living in bitter exile in California. From the opening scenes, you are aware of the performance as a stunt--a conscious tour de force--but Kingsley gives the movie a continuous focus and tension. He's certainly the only entertainment in this noble pool of despair. Massoud Amir Behrani, to give the man his full name, as he insists, struggles to maintain standards for himself. He may work on a road crew during the day and as a clerk in a convenience store at night, but he changes into a perfectly tailored gray suit after each job and returns home to his family at the wheel of an old Mercedes. At a lavish wedding party that he throws for his daughter, he makes a speech in superb English which draws...
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