A successful movie about the dispossessed should make viewers feel out of place, even alienated. House of Sand and Fog definitely succeeds in accomplishing this goal. Rather than lose your physical bearings, you become morally uncomfortable watching people who are literally displaced. As the movie spirals into a tragedy of errors, each character's soul is in danger of evaporating along with the Northern California coastal fog.

The stark edifice is based on the novel by Andre Dubus III and buttressed by sublime performances from Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly as polar opposites wrangling over a house. Portraying an alcoholic wrongly evicted from her home, Connelly is at once gorgeous and ragged. In beautiful disarray, she assumes the jagged personality of an addict: she's a well-intentioned, wounded animal. Her husband has left and, though sober, she's on the edge, working a menial job and neglecting commonplace tasks like opening the mail. When she's kicked out of the house, a married deputy sheriff (Ron Eldard) lends a hand and they become lovers.

Kingsley makes a serious run at this year's Best Actor Oscar playing an exiled Iranian colonel and proud family man. After throwing his daughter a lavish wedding, he's forced to work on a highway construction crew and in a convenience store. To keep up appearances, he changes into an expensive suit before coming home to an unaffordable luxury apartment. With his last chunk of money, he buys the woman's house at auction and moves in with his wife and son, intending to flip it for a big profit. Finding herself in increasingly dire straits, Connelly confronts him. He refuses to sell it back to the county for what he paid. Following a series of interactions, the sheriff -- having left his wife and kids, and displaying racist xenophobia -- injects himself into the dispute with disastrous results.

House of Sand and Fog works best as a character study, and myriad details about the principals resist summarization. Something disconcertingly artificial about the chain of events undercuts the film's aspirations to classical tragedy. The catalyzing force is the least interesting and arguably most culpable figure, the cop. Great misfortunes can result from misunderstandings, blunderings, or communication failures.  Yet the two main figures are more different than alike -- and being linked by a fairly ordinary house with a partially obscured ocean view seems too accidental. The rigid Iranian, who we assume was ethically challenged in his former life, is oversized compared to the feckless young woman. Broken and confused, her tragedy plays out on a smaller, more familiar scale; he is a legitimate tragic figure, she isn't. Still, no one is blameless and no one gains redemption or catharsis.

First-time director Vadim Perelman is able to conjure an appropriately foreboding atmosphere; however, his real accomplishment results from coaxing performances. (The movie's third remarkable turn is by Shohreh Aghdashloo as Kingsley's wife.) House of Sand and Fog is a downer; a bleak work dotted with nobility thanks to Kingsley's character and performance. Because he is both pathetic and uplifting, he belongs in classical tragedy. And he certainly overshadows the film's cultural topicality as a domestic collision between the Muslim world and the West. 

(Released by Dreamworks and rated "R" for violence, disturbing images, language and sex.)