Behrany's Character Analysis

What has happened to Kathy isn't precisely her fault, but she could easily have prevented it -- for example, by responding to some of the delinquency notices that have been piling up among her unopened mail. Her self-destructiveness is bitterly galling, but we never quite believe she's a bad person, and every false step she takes will make you wince. Should she really go out with that beefcake deputy (Ron Eldard) who helped evict her -- the one who's wearing a wedding ring and who likes to drink wine? (Remember, Kathy's a recovering alcoholic.) Should she really start smoking again? Should she really buy a dozen of those little airplane-size bottles of José Cuervo and then go for a long late-night drive? (Well, nobody should do that -- the
Kingsley is justly renowned for his chameleonic ability to play any ethnicity, and here he comes off as the very embodiment of Persian aristocratic pride. He loves his wife and son, and can be tender and generous to them, but does not tolerate any questioning of his authority. His contempt for the laziness and fecklessness of Americans like Kathy -- "They have the eyes of small children, forever looking for the next distraction," Behrani tells his son -- is only worsened by the ignorance and casual racism with which they treat him. Not that he is altogether innocent of such attitudes himself; early on, he rages at his wife: "I did not come to America to work like an Arab! To be treated like an Arab!"
Behrani's pride won't let him smile over the mistake, take his money back and move his family out, and Kathy's combination of wounded arrogance and sheer desperation won't allow her to leave the Behranis alone. By the time Behrani decapitates the top of her house to install a "widow's walk" from which to see the ocean (it's actually a good idea), and Kathy winds up in their bathroom with a nasty puncture wound in her foot and Mrs. Behrani making her tea, "House of Sand and Fog" begins to feel like a comedy of errors that isn't one bit
On one hand we have Kingsley, the luminous Aghdashloo (a grande dame of the Iranian expatriate community) and the sweet and serious Ahdout, a family that for all its old-fashioned sexism and dysfunction is based, at least in theory, on dignity, love and mutual respect. On the other, we have Kathy, spiraling back into the bottle and clinging -- because she has nothing else -- to the demented schemes of Eldard's unhappily married deputy, who's as bent on self-destruction as she is. I guess his character is supposed to be a cipher, but the part is undercooked to the point of rawness, and Eldard's male-model blankness makes him seem more like a leftover cyborg from "Terminator 3" than a plausible loose-cannon