The Secret Lives of Dentists

Starring Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003) tells the story of a married couple whose partnership begins unravel due to forces both real and imagined. More broadly, it explores the damage that can be done when a husband and wife fail to communicate with one another.

Scott and Davis play David and Dana Hurst, married dentists who share a practice and spend their off-hours caring for their three young daughters. From the surface, things look – if not picture perfect – then at least fairly normal. However, the dynamics between the couple rapidly begin to shift when David catches Dana in the embrace of another man.

This mystery man is never identified, and it may well have been an innocent encounter, but David simply cannot shake from his mind the luminous glow that came across Dana's face when she was in his arms. To make matters worse, a cantankerous patient named Slater (Denis Leary in his usual acerbic mode) insists on publicly humiliating the confrontation-shy dentist for putting a defective filling in his teeth.

Soon David finds himself in a frantic state, convinced that his wife is having an affair but terrified to confront her about it for fear of the changes it will inevitably wreak on their life. Meanwhile, the thought of Dana's infidelity eats away at him, and he soon begins to hold imaginary conversations with Slater, who becomes something of a devil on his shoulder. Whether the affair is real or imagined, what's certain is that David's increasingly erratic behavior is tearing his family apart.

The film, based on the novella The Age of Grief, is only the second of Jane Smiley's books to be adapted onto the screen (the first was the disastrous version of A Thousand Acres starring Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer). Given Smiley's penchant for chronicling the minutiae of family life and her reliance on internal monologue for her characters, this can hardly be considered surprising. Perhaps The Secret Lives of Dentists's greatest strength is in its ability to show the inner workings of David's mind.

Using an amber glow to convey events of the past and cooler tones to show David's fantasy world, director Alan Rudolph is able to lovingly construct scenes of David and Dana's early marriage and illustrate in a more menacing fashion the doctor's overactive imagination.

Scott and Davis both turn in sensitive performances as a couple at odds with each other, and their scenes with the child actors who play their daughters have a wonderfully naturalistic feel to them. However, Rudolph’s fidelity to the source material makes for a slow-moving film at times, and those without the patience for a character study might do best to avoid this one.

The DVD includes an illuminating short documentary dissecting a pivotal scene in the film as well as a commentary by Alan Rudolph and Campbell Scott, deleted scenes, and a blooper reel.