From a novella entitled “The Age of Grief,” The Secret Lives of Dentists is a vigorous peek into the dark side of a marriage meeting middle age. The title itself evokes man’s fascination with the question: “What is really there?” We are all terminally curious as to what secrets and mechanics of life lie behind the people we walk by every day. In an appropriately passionless monologue Dave Hurst gives us this backstage access as he passes through a dark hour of his life. “Death is nothing to a tooth,” he says. “Life is what destroys teeth.” And then he lets us watch life grind him down into nothing.


Dave and his wife are dentists who share a practice as they raise their three daughters by night. Dave’s transition from dentist chair to dinner table is hardly discernable, as he usually seems to treat his wife with the same professional detachment he uses at work. Often he will drop his bedside manner for his children, but in the main the cool and steady-handed demeanor that has made him successful at work spills over into his personal life as well. Campbell Scott’s tight-lipped performance at times is so convincing that his passivity alone channels the tension the “coming of middle-age” storyline is trying to build.


In the background are his wife and her unrequited love for opera and performance. She is successful at work, intelligently artistic, but otherwise totally unappreciated. Dana also has the peculiar habit of running off on random errands that often keep her out much longer than she had expected. Unfortunately, Dave is not puzzled by this at all. He knows, or is pretty sure he knows, exactly what is going on because he caught her kissing another man backstage before one of her performances.


Dave’s decision not to tell his wife that he had seen her leads to remarkable consequences for his family. In one deliriously extended scene, Rudolph lets the camera drift through the house during a psychosomatic outburst of the flu. The unspoken tension between Dave and his wife exerts a dominating and nauseating influence over the house for a five day period of quarantine in a sequence that almost feels that long. Rudolph’s acute emotional sensitivity really comes through here though and we see Dave as caring father and aching husband trying to come to terms with himself as a frightened individual wondering what to do and when.


The most successful feature of the film is how Rudolph really captures the range of emotions we don’t often see on film in this situation. Infidelity often leads to rage, to anger, to revenge, and even to resigned acceptance. But in the crafted nuances of Dave and Dana we see shame, unspoken marital desire, and fear. This fear is exacerbated for Dave by the fantastical presence of Denis Leary in the form of Slater, a burned-out trumpet player whom Dave met in reality in his dental office. Dave’s psychological decline is marked by the frequent mix of fantasy and reality in which his worst fears concerning his wife come true, and Slater is the only thing there to make sense of it all for him. Needless to say, Denis Leary is not the one you want to have whispering in your ear through a time of profound marital crisis and Dave’s journey back to decisive action results in a radical reorientation of what is real and what isn’t in his life.


The Secret Lives of Dentists is not a charming film by any means. But it is a compelling look at what really lies at the heart of marriage. In an age not exactly characterized by conviction and commitment, Dave’s ultimate decision ironically amounts to what is a surprise ending.