In the Bedroom

Even the hardest-headed among us would admit that it's fun when movies tell us lies about how things are. The world many films portray looks much like ours but contains a lot more justice and magic and love. That's fine; we all know what we're getting into when we watch those films, and we derive some measure of solace from the unreality.

But "In the Bedroom," Todd Field's directorial debut, tells it like it really, uncomfortably is for the first two-thirds or so of its running time, then suddenly slips into telling a comforting, shopworn lie to push itself to its conclusion. Lies are not so comforting when they follow truth, and our sympathies are not engaged, as they would be in a film that lied to us the whole time. Instead, "In the Bedroom" suddenly feels achingly hollow, and the first two-thirds of the film are corrupted in our memory by the denouement's dishonesty.

Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek play Dr. Matt and Ruth Fowler, well-educated Maine residents and parents of Frank (Nick Stahl). Frank is an aspiring architect who will attend college in the fall, but right now he's romancing an older woman, a divorced convenience-store cashier with two kids named Natalie Strout (Marisa Tomei). The Dr. and Mrs. Fowler disagree on how and whether to gently impress upon Frank that he shouldn't pursue this romance much further; Natalie's ex-husband, Richard Strout (William Mapother), isn't so gentle or so indecisive. Richard's interventions end in a catastrophe that is no less awful for its predictability, and the Fowlers are left to pick up the shards of their lives.

What strikes sparks in this part of the movie is not the plot but the presentation, as Field patiently extracts telling scenes from the flow, gentle then turbulent, of the Fowlers' lives. Field's direction avoids histrionics; he doesn't use music to tell us how to feel, and his shots, while well-composed, serve our comprehension rather than an (obvious) overarching directorial agenda. The leisurely pace enhances the realism; the opening moments, picking up details from all over to eventually make a portrait, feel less like an exposition than an unfolding. The richness of the world thus created makes it all the more shattring when tragedy befalls it, and Field trains the same patient eye on the various forms a grief beyond words takes in the character's actions. And while Spacek and Wilkinson have been praised for their performances, "performance" may not be the appropriate word for what they do. Rather than show us what they are feeling at every juncture, they simply embody their characters, and trust Field to bring out the subtleties thus embodied: Spacek's bitterness and exhaustion, Wilkinson's anger and refuge in humor, and the love they share for their son, an axiom of their universe.

This love supposedly drives Wilkinson to a desperate, decisive action whose nature you all will guess when I tell you it is what you would expect if Michael Douglas were playing Dr. Fowler. I say "supposedly" because this section of the movie feels utterly alien to its opening. Wilkinson is performing here, turning his dark eyes into lances and his posture into a threat. Field encourages him by borrowing shots, conventions and even patterns of dialogue from films which couldn't even imagine doing what "In the Bedroom"'s opening does. We no longer know Dr. Fowler; we simply watch him. And it feels as though we have lost something precious, just as when our trust is violated in the real world. "In the Bedroom" is a painful film to watch, but ultimately for the wrong reasons: the lie told for our comfort is much more disturbing than the shattering truth which precedes it.

INSIDE THE MIND, SUCH AS IT IS, OF A MOVIE REVIEWER: EVOLUTION

Susan Abbott and Nate Vaughan were in a Honda Accord station wagon driving me back to their home after I saw "In the Bedroom" (and they saw "Ocean's Eleven"), and they both know my opinion of the film already. "Why they hell should they read your review, then?" you may well ask. The answer is that this review is way better put than the various unconnected statements they heard me make in the car. For one thing, it's coherent, and uninterrupted by my passionate defenses of the virtues of "Ocean's Eleven." For another thing, it does not contain the following phrases:

• "a serious cases of the stupids"
• "the punchable Nick Stahl"
• "You know something bad's going to happen to them because they listen to the Red Sox."
• "Every reviewer who liked this movie is wrong."

So I tend to think this is way better than what I said earlier. After all, being a movie reviewer isn't all seeing movies for free before they come out and eating Universal Pictures' cornbread in swanky Manhattan hotels. You have to write a review, and I thought the above phrases, though entertaining, were not appropriate for the actual review. On the other hand, I found them entertaining enough to put right below the review, and it doesn't even matter since the review above isn't going to appear in the paper. [It actually did end up appearing in the paper, in abbreviated form, though I had no way of knowing it would at the time.] I have no idea what I'm doing.

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