The threat of infidelity rears its destructive head in “The Secret Lives of Dentists,” a drama about marriage told from the male perspective that would make an ideal double bill with “Eyes Wide Shut.” Based on Jane Smiley’s novella “The Age of Grief,” the movie centers on David (Campbell Scott) and Dana Hurst (Hope Davis), who have been married for 10 years, have three young daughters and share the same dental practice.
On the surface, there’s nothing unusual about the Hursts’ home life: Director Alan Rudolph (“The Moderns,” “Trixie”) captures the comforting, messy normalcy of their daily routine. But after catching a fleeting glimpse of Dana kissing another man, David begins to doubt everything he’s taken for granted.
The movie is at its best when Rudolph allows Scott (“Roger Dodger”) and Davis (“About Schmidt”) to burrow into the darker corners of a marriage whose participants may have started to take each other a little too much for granted. Rudolph being Rudolph, however, the movie injects an unwelcome element of surrealism in the form of one of David’s patients (played by Denis Leary) who becomes a personification of his repressed id, sitting alongside him as he argues with his wife, riding with him in his car, constantly needling him to deal with the situation head-on, something David seems incapable of doing.
Leary’s presence quickly grows tiresome, and “Dentists” would have been a better movie without him. But Scott and Davis keep you interested in the Hursts’ dilemma as a couple wondering when the flame in their romance blew out, and whether or not there’s any hope of rekindling it.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
