The Substance of Fire Reviews

Daniel Sullivan's earnest adaptation of Jon Robin Baitz's play is worth seeing for Ron Rifkin's performance alone. Rifkin stars as New York publisher Isaac Geldhart, who as a child watched while his family was taken away to die in a Nazi concentration camp. That memory has defined his life and now threatens to destroy it: Isaac feels compelled to publish only expensively bound accounts of atrocities and genocide, not quite the sort of books that fly off the shelves. When Isaac rejects a surefire bestseller in favor of a four-volume reference work on the medical experiments of Dr. Mengele -- a noble endeavor, but one that will surely sink the house -- Isaac's children (Tony Goldwyn, Timothy Hutton and Sarah Jessica Parker) are forced to make a painful choice: They can win their father's love by indulging his obsessions, or they can save the family business. Rifkin's work here is astonishing: As Isaac's eccentric bibliomania slowly degenerates into more serious dementia, he deftly captures the essence of a man who's losing the three most important things in his life: his mind, his memories and his family.