by MATTHEW HAYS

It must be asked. Isn't director Vadim Perelman's feature debut, House of Sand and Fog, a wee bit too dark for a Christmas release?

"Actually, it's coming out on Dec. 26," Perelman responds. I suppose that lets the film off the hook.

It may sound like a minor question, but frankly, it's logical. Even by American Beauty standards, House of Sand and Fog is about as grim as filmmaking gets. Along with the other dark films of the past couple of years, it marks a low-tide mark in terms of mainstream studio tolerance of nasty, beyond-hope thematics, matched only by the '70s spate of features like the first two Godfather films and Chinatown, informed by the spectres of both Vietnam and Watergate.

The movie stems from the highly acclaimed Andre Dubus III bestseller, an Oprah Book Club pick that the talk-show host called an elaborate metaphor for war itself. The film has Sir Ben Kingsley playing an Iranian émigré (he served in the Shah's military so we know he can't be a saintly character) desperate to keep his family living above a certain standard of living. Despite their rather chichi digs, Kingsley leaves early each morning to dig ditches and run a convenience store - menial, undignified tasks. One morning, he spots an ad in the newspaper for government auctioned properties; there, he sees a golden opportunity. For a paltry $16,000, he can own government-appropriated property, a house with a view of the beach. He snatches it up, knowing full well that with a paint job and some minor renos, he can sell it for five times as much. His desperate financial woes, it seems, will finally be coming to a close.

Home wrecker

Cut to Jennifer Connelly, who plays what can now only be referred to as a Jennifer Connelly role: a sad sack with an aura of tragedy about her. Recovering from a divorce and her own addiction, Connelly hasn't been opening her mail for months, and has thus missed the repeated warnings from the state about some nasty obscure tax she hasn't paid up. The cops show up one morning and she's out on her ass. When she tries to clear up the problem using a local legal clinic, it's too late: Kingsley's already purchased her house. What follows is an increasingly gruelling war of wills between the two. There's no humour in House of Sand and Fog. There are barely any redeeming moments. It's just sad and grim, a horrid reflection on our species' tendency to eschew compromise and go for the greed.

It's sort of odd, then, that the film is directed by Perelman, as his only experience before taking on this feature was helming various slick TV commercials. "That was definitely a mark against him," Dubus tells me. But something in Perelman's passion and understanding of Sand and Fog won Dubus over. "My agent got over 140 calls about the film rights for this book. They all wanted to change the ending, saying it was too much of a downer. Perelman got ahold of me, and he said, "I know what you're worried about: you're worried that someone is going to take your baby, chain it to the radiator, rape it and then murder it. I am not going to hurt your baby." When we started to discuss the book and his ideas around it, I could see he wasn't going to hurt it."

Perelman says he drew heavily on his own immigrant experience, having been a Jewish émigré who left the former Soviet Union with his mother in the late '70s. After living in squalor in Vienna for a year, they settled in Edmonton, where Perelman took as many film studies courses as he could at the University of Alberta before heading to Toronto to study at Ryerson.

Dreamworks came knocking

If Perelman, director of ads for such companies as Mastercard and Coors, seemed a long shot, perhaps Dubus found something in the aspiring director to identify with. The book, as Dubus recounts, was not an easy sell. "I took it to 22 publishers over two years, all said no. I wrote it over a four-year period, much of which was spent living in a car. It was never easy. I don't know that it's supposed to be."

Dubus says the inspiration for Sand and Fog came years ago, when he dated a Persian girl as a teenager. "I was totally in love with her. As we were dating I got to know her parents, who were devout Muslims. He had been an important person in his native country - exactly like Kingsley's character in the book - and was now having to do all sorts of menial jobs to get by. Years later, I read a story about a woman who got evicted from her home - and they had the wrong house! I mean, it really happened. Her house was eventually returned to her, but not after a lot of heartache. At a certain point, I thought it'd be fascinating to put these two stories together."

Despite its gloomy plot, House of Sand and Fog has emerged as a success story, both in book and movie form (at least critically - whether or not holiday audiences take to its downer scenario remains to be seen). Perelman lined up his talent and backers and then found the studios in a bidding war; Dreamworks assured him final cut, and so he went with them.

Dubus, meanwhile, initially found success a difficult pill to swallow. "After the book really took off, money stopped being a worry. This was entirely new territory for me to be in. I got severely depressed. I couldn't really handle it. Finally, I went for therapy to deal with it. My therapist told me that I was basically hard wired for bad news. She said, ‘Look, you've had enough rough things happen in your life. And you've had to roll with those. Now that good things are happening, roll with those too.'

"I've learned to. The irony is that this book is based on a fight over a house. And that book has allowed me, finally, to build a house of my own."

House of Sand and Fog opens Friday, Dec. 26

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