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The Secret Lives of Dentists

All is not serene in the household of married dentists Hope Davis and Dave Hurst.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary
Director: Alan Rudolph
Rating: R for sexuality and language
Genre: Drama

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (R) 105 minutes

Grade: B+

Verdict: A muted but engrossing look at marriage at a crossroads.

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

After 10 years, three children and a second home, David (Campbell Scott) and Dana's (Hope Davis) marriage is as much about carpooling, fixing meals and mopping up baby puke as it is about passion. They're tired a lot.

The only thing that keeps Dana excited is singing in the chorus of the local opera. Ducking backstage the night of her performance, David glimpses her talking to a strange man and smiling in a way he hasn't seen in a long time. It's the first clue that his wife may have some secrets.

Based on Jane Smiley's novella “The Age of Grief,” the movie is titled “The Secret Lives of Dentists” because, well, that's what David and Dana are, and that's what they have. They share a practice, drilling teeth all day, juggling one another's patients and deciding who picks up the kids that night, who wrangles dinner.

Their three daughters aren't exactly TV-perfect. Lizzie, the eldest, always seems to be sick, and the baby, Leah, has a bad face-slapping habit and wails constantly for Daddy. You can see how tempting it might be, for either David or Dana, to fall into a hobby, or someone else's arms, to escape the grind.

But is Dana cheating, or is David misreading the signs? She spends a little too long on a morning errand to grab orange juice, and comes home a tad late for dinner. Her questions have become both vague and pointed: “Do you like me? . . . Do you think that we're friends?” It's as if she's quietly reevaluating their marriage, and David senses the ozone of a coming storm. Or maybe it's nothing at all. Still, he admits, “I wish she looked at me with desire instead of regret.”

David creates an imaginary confidant in Slater (Denis Leary), modeled on a particularly abrasive patient, a jazz trumpeter whose wife has thrown him out. Unseen by the others, the scruffy, leather-wearing Slater urges David to reconnect with his inner jerk. He needles him over the dinner table to take charge of things, to discipline his bratty kids, and to ask Dana point-blank what's going on.

That's exactly what David doesn't want to know, because truth (the truth he fears, at least) would require consequences, recriminations, action. He lives in a dull ache of suspicion and building vertigo, standing at the edge of something he knows could make every bit of normal life plunge out from under his feet.

The fear of infidelity has driven so many movies, and inspired so many approaches — from the comedy of Preston Sturges' “Unfaithfully Yours” to the melodrama of last year's “Unfaithful.” But unlike the steamy sex, tears and murder of “Unfaithful,” “Dentists” is mature, muted; the worst violence here happens when a framed print on the dining room wall is knocked a little crooked. The movie is ultimately more about fidelity than infidelity, the hard work of protecting the safe harbor of family.

After misfires like “Trixie,” director Alan Rudolph returns to strong form here. And though he (with the help of playwright Craig Lucas' script) sometimes overdoes Slater's presence, as well as a fantasy scene involving David's sexy, sardonic assistant (Robin Tunney), the focus remains on the central couple.

Attractive in her off-kilter way, brimming with intelligence and willing to be unsympathetic, Davis is ideal as the enigmatic Dana. But it's Scott who holds the picture together. As we watch him agonizing over whether to act or not, it makes sense that he's played Hamlet on stage and screen before. His David is a tirelessly decent figure. He makes being a mensch not only noble but dramatic.