“There are enormous forces that a human being can bring to bear to sustain, to accommodate, to understand, and to cope with loss,” Kingsley says. “We are extraordinary animals in our capacity to endure loss after loss after loss. To put it very briefly, Behrani is a man who lost his king, and then loses his kingdom, his son, his wife, his home and, finally, himself.”
Behrani is not the only one who suffers great loss. Loss is also the driving factor in the life of his adversary, Kathy Nicolo, in her fight to hold on to the one thing she has left in the world: her house. Jennifer Connelly, who stars as Kathy, remarks, “She is really lost at the beginning of the film. She has been left by her husband and had to overcome a drug addiction, and so now she is in her house, kind of hibernating, when she is wrongly evicted for non-payment of a tax she never owed. You come to understand, I think, why the house means so much to her, and why she is so stubbornly clinging to it.”
Connelly says that she was immediately interested in portraying Kathy after reading the script, which she describes as “moving and beautifully written,” adding, “I liked the fact that there is no good guy and bad guy. I found it really compelling that both sides do things that are morally questionable, because life is often like that.”
Not long after Connelly accepted the role, however, her own life changed dramatically. Michael London explains, “Jennifer committed to it right before she won the Academy Award® for ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ and she was immediately deluged. But she remained extraordinarily loyal to our project. I think she understood Kathy, and knew in her bones that she could take this character and give her the kind of dimension that she has. I don’t think there is another actress who could have played Kathy with such power and grace.”
Perelman is aware that “power” is a quality others might not have attributed to the role of Kathy, but counters, “Some people might interpret Kathy as a weak character, but I don’t think she is. She is caught in a whirlpool and is being pulled down and, like a drowning victim, she becomes more and more desperate. At that point of desperation, she starts grabbing at straws, grabbing at anything to get her house back in any way possible.” Connelly agrees. “Kathy is reaching for things to hold onto to keep her afloat, but they are things that are never going to be able to save her.”
At first, Kathy tries to regain ownership of her house with the help of legal aid attorney Connie Walsh, played by Frances Fisher. When legal channels fail her, Kathy reaches out to Lester Burdon, ironically the Deputy Sheriff she first met when he was sent to evict her from the house.
Perelman went through a rather long casting process to find the right actor to play Lester Burdon, but says that when he saw Ron Eldard, he knew he was perfect for the role. “I wanted somebody who could convey this incredible feeling of vulnerability, and also had a kind of off-kilter magnetism about him, and Ron was just right for both. He did a great job as Lester.”
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