The Substance of Fire

Rating:
Summary: The Generational Legacy Of Survival
Review: The Substance Of Fire is a powerful, profoundly upsetting investigation into the effects of the Holocaust on the lives of a present day New York City family. Although decades have elapsed since Isaac Geldhart escaped the persecution and slaughter as a small child, the recent death of his beloved wife triggers an ineluctable slide into willful self-destruction and resultant victimhood. His loss, it would seem, creates the internal conditions for symbolic reenactment of the childhood trauma. His three children, already struggling with the generational effects of having a father who is a survivor, must now cope with the emotional detritus thus created as well as their own grief over their mother's passing. The context for this poignant, intensely disturbing scenario is the publishing house Isaac operates with his eldest son, Aaron. The other two children are passive shareholders in the once lucrative business which is progressively being run into the ground by their father; a man who is increasingly obsessed with taking on authors whose work is mostly esoteric, commercially unviable, and concerned with morbid themes of death and destruction (like the title Water On Fire which is devoted to the Hiroshima Holocaust). As the film begins Isaac has become fixated on bringing to life a financially unpromising four volume study devoted to the Nazi medical experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengles, written by a friend and concentration camp survivor. Not only is Isaac committed to publishing a work which clearly has no market, he is determined to bring it out in a fabulously expensive hand sewn version printed to perfection on the finest paper known to mankind. Aaron, meanwhile, is about to sign an author of a potentially bestselling novel which might have the salutary effect of saving the business from what looks to be certain bankruptcy. Isaac refuses to allow his son to publish what he considers rubbish and the stage is set for a family confrontation that threatens to turn everything upside down in the lives of these four vulnerable, all too sympathetic characters. What ensues is the stuff of great tragedy and pathos. The cast of this wonderfully nuanced, beautifully written film is superb. Timothy Hutton, as the youngest son who already in life has faced the rigors of surviving a potentially fatal disease, turns in a performance that repeatedly pierced my heart. Having been cared for by Isaac during the worst of his illness, he now volunteers to care for his father during his own fall from grace and good health. And both Sarah Jessica Parker and Tony Goldwyn, as they portray Isaac's other children, are sensational. Ron Rifkin as Isaac is the center of gravity of this film, however. He carries the burden of his past as well as an exigent need for atonement with astonishing strength until he ultimately breaks down and begins to spill his suppressed misery into the lives of his children whom he cherishes yet cannot really love. But redemption is never totally out of reach, the film suggests, as ultimately The Substance Of Fire provides the viewer with a shred of hope about the most hopeless of human situations.