Was her father’s dying legacy to her and her brother. Nicolo, on the other hand, has to get the house back: it Getting the house back through the courts may take months, and now Massoud Behrani wants not his original payment, but four times that amount: the current appraised value. The sale may be llegal on one level, but Kathy’s negligence has left her in a precarious position. She also doesn’t open her mail for weeks at a time, and so she misses the numerous warnings sent out by the county. The problem is, Nicolo is broke, doesn’t run a business, and has no taxes to pay. Having fled Iran, and now trying to pull their shattered lives back together, the father, Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani ( Ben Kingsley), buys a beachside bungalow in San Francisco that is being auctioned by the county because its owner, Kathy Nicolo ( Jennifer Connelly), cannot pay business taxes on it. Without giving away any crucial details, let's just say that desperation and stubbornness can be a really bad combination.Plot summary SPOILER WARNING: The following contains important plot details of the entire film. (At this point in the movie, she's homeless and broke, so her motivation to get back into the house is quite strong.) Colonel Behrani has financial prosperity within his grasp, and he's not about to give that up without a fight. Kathy refuses to just sit there and let her house be taken away from her. To make matters worse, one of the cops who evicted her from her home and later took pity on her, Lester Burdon (played by Ron Eldard), becomes involved in the situation as well, and not in a good way. She continually visits the property and harasses the Behrani family. There's just one problem - Kathy is determined not to let all this happen. Finally, he and his family can crawl out from the financial burden that has plagued them for the past few years. After a few months, they put it on the market for $174,000 - nearly four times the purchase price. ![]() They purchase Kathy's house for $45,000 and do some quick fix-ups on the property. Things are going very well for Massoud Behrani and his family. Also, since she didn't read or respond to the mail from the tax assessor, she's partly in the wrong for the loss of her house, making things far more complicated than they should have been. She gets a lawyer from legal aid to help get her house back, but the process may take months, and Kathy doesn't want to wait that long. Understandably, Kathy is very upset about all this. Guess who buys the property? At this point, Kathy and Massoud have officially crossed paths with each other. Her house ends up being sold at an auction. After receiving an erroneous business tax assessment on her property, she ignores all the follow-up mail and ends up being evicted from her home. Her husband has left her, she's trying to recover from alcoholism and she has a hard time getting out of bed in general. It would have been helpful to reinforce that fact, especially considering the nature of some of the plot points. It turns out that the story takes place a few years after the Iranian Revolution (which started in 1979), so it's probably set in the early or mid 1980's. Another frustrating thing was the fact that the movie never makes it clear when this story takes place. Obviously, the movie is far more complicated than that, but Dreamworks sure didn't seem to do a very good job of making that clear to the general masses. Well, stop the presses! I know I can't resist a good story about people arguing over a house. And all the trailers and previews I saw conveyed only one thing - people arguing over a house. I know it's traditional to keep the name, but in this case, couldn't an exception have been made? The title is booooring. (It was nominated for three Oscars, but it didn't win any of them.) For starters, the movie is based on the book of the same name by André Dubus III. ![]() It almost seemed like it was being aimed directly at the Oscars. I don't know if that was deliberate, but somehow this movie didn't seem marketed for the masses. What frustrated me the most about this movie was how badly marketed it was.
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