**** (out of ****)
Starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei, and Karen Allen.
Directed, co-produced, and co-written for the screen by Todd Field
2001 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2001
“In the Bedroom” has scenes so well done I almost could not watch them. That’s odd praise for a film, but this isn’t the usual Friday night at the movies, and it’s not a date movie, unless you and your date are engaged. “In the Bedroom” is about a marriage and a tragedy, and both are documented so effectively that what is painful to the characters becomes painful to us.
Man and wife are played with enormous reserve and grit by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek. Many of their scenes together are worthy of being shown in newlywed seminars. Words cannot praise the strength of their performances, he as a small town doctor in New England, she as a high school choir director. They have a good marriage and one son (Nick Stahl), home for the summer from college, and he is having an affair with an older woman (Marisa Tomei) about to finalize a divorce. Wilkinson is proud of his son for being able to woo this beauty, for treating her two small children so well, and for being on the verge of a rich and interesting life. Does he look at Tomei and live vicariously through his son? Maybe a little, but mostly he is happy for his boy and revitalized by the energy of the young couple, so much so that he has taken to pouncing on his wife and making her giggle. Spacek keeps her opinion of her son’s romance to herself, save a few loaded looks and slips of the tongue. Tomei’s husband, a hopeless lout, shows up now and again, and we know things might not end safely.
Besides that I will not speak of the plot, only that it takes a tragic turn and we are treated to one episode after another in which the characters involved try to cope with the disaster. “In the Bedroom” may sound like a melodrama, and there are so many chances when it could have turned into one. Even the title sounds a little like a soap opera, but the movie never steps wrong, it never goes for cheap sentiment in place of the worn faces of Wilkinson and Spacek trying to cope like adults. The film has so many notes in it, but they never overlap, and each is given time to breathe: the young couple’s sense of life opening up for them is a mirror to the older couple’s recollections of the same, only now their expectations are in their son. There is the son’s eagerness to protect his new love, a mixture of possessiveness and a genuine sense of responsibility. There is the father’s pride in being a doctor while at the same time longing for the freedom of being a fisherman. And the son’s indecision between college and fishing, and the natural process of silencing between husband and wife as time goes by; and so on and so forth, all tied together, at the same time left untied when tragedy strikes. The characters are unique, and of a specific time and place, but “In the Bedroom’s” views of an enduring marriage relationship are universal. Seeing it with my wife made me think of everything that lays in store for us in the coming decades.
Co-screenwriter and first-time director Todd Field (the piano player in “Eyes Wide Shut,” another film about marriage) is unconcerned with hurling his plot ahead, and instead lets his network of characters blossom as few movies do. “In the Bedroom” is as graceful and meditative as the New England summer in which it is set, and as harsh and uncompromising as the passage of time and mortality its aging couple so clearly feels. I was not expecting “In the Bedroom” to be as powerful as it is. It’s one of the best movies of 2001.
Finished April 18, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night