I don't understand why everybody is making such a fuss over In the Bedroom, Todd Field's first feature-length movie. The film has a few surprisingly good moments, but these are vastly outweighed by its creakinesses, its unlikelihoods, and its forced, false emotions. It deals with a subject--the murder of a beloved only child--that is almost destined to fail if it does not rise uncannily above itself, and given this choice, In the Bedroom opts repeatedly for failure. That it should do so is comprehensible and perhaps even honorable (as ambitious failures are often honorable), but it does not make for a coherent, aesthetically satisfying, emotionally rewarding artistic experience.
In the Bedroom is actually three movies bundled into one, and like its youthful hero, each of the three gets cut off in its prime. First there is the Maine-local-color movie, a portrait of the seaside town of Camden, with undertones of harshness and potential violence shimmering through the wealth of natural beauty. This segment introduces us to Frank Fowler, a handsome, engaging, promising young architecture student appealingly played by Nick Stahl; his parents, a doctor (Tom Wilkinson) and a music teacher (Sissy Spacek); his girlfriend, Natalie (Marisa Tomei), a slightly older woman with two young boys from a former marriage; and her ex-husband, a threatening nogoodnik who happens to be the scion of the town's wealthiest family, owners of the local fishery. It also introduces us to a range of supporting characters and to the town of Camden itself.
But already one senses something false here. If you've ever seen FrederickWiseman's terrific documentary Belfast, Maine, you'll recognize that Field'sversion of a small Maine town is a sanitized, Hollywoodized portrayal, focusingalmost completely on the generically American upper-middle-class types andignoring the very people who give such towns their rich, strange, and sometimesfrightening local character. The film's verisimilitude is not helped by the factthat virtually none of the actors have mastered the distinctive regional accentsof Maine. Marisa Tomei is especially badly miscast: She sounds, indeed, like alocal girl, but her locale is audibly Brooklyn, and when she tries to dosomething approaching a down-east inflection, it comes out instead as ChicoMarx. ("I love-a you," she tells Frank in one of their early scenes together.) Ialso thought it odd that her ex-husband, who is supposed to come from a very richfamily, spoke with the lowest regional accent--but then, class is one of thesubjects on which In the Bedroom seems distinctly unclear.
Sex is another. Repeatedly, the movie tells us that the female of the speciesis bad news. During a fishing episode that provides the movie's title, wise oldDr. Fowler tells one of Natalie's young sons that the lady lobster is the one towatch out for, since what happens "In the Bedroom" is likely to cost the competing males a limb or two, at the very least. This little nugget sets us up for movie number two, the one that begins when Thuggish Ex-Husband shoots Lovable Young Frank through the eye. (I must admit that at this point, with the loss of the only character I cared anything about, my interest in the film diminished severely. If it had been a better movie--if it had been even half as good, for instance, as Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother--my attachment to the dead boy could have worked in the film's favor. But it never had any hopes of being that good.)
The middle section of In the Bedroom has been widely praised as an astute, sensitive, moving portrait of parental grief. No description could be more inaccurate. Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek are not just unconvincing in the roles of bereaved parents; they are pretty much incomprehensible. Especially in the case of Spacek (whose youthful gutsiness has hardened into a kind of taut, dry absence of warmth), I couldn't figure out whether we were supposed to be watching Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People or the grieving mother in All About MyMother--whether the mother, that is, was supposed to be a monster or a sympathetic victim. The movie itself can't figure this out, and the director isn't giving his actors any hints. Is Mrs. Fowler just another lady lobster, responsible for her son's flight to an equally dangerous other woman? (This is the accusation her husband levels in a moment of subsequently retracted rage.) Or is she a martyr to a small-town culture which takes everything she cares about away from her--even, eventually, her capacity to grieve for her son? Both possibilities are suggested, but neither is enacted to any persuasive degree.
In the end, we are simply transferred over to movie number three: a revengedrama in thriller mode, complete with nighttime killing, disposal of body, andclose call near a police station. But nothing comes of this plot at all--it endsin midstream, just like the other two, before we can even begin to imaginewhether Frank's parents will ultimately have to pay for the vigilante murder oftheir son's killer. It's barely credible that two mildmannered people could bedriven crazy enough by grief to engage in this sort of plotted-out revenge. Butthe movie pushes us too far when it asks us to believe that Dr. Fowler's bestfriend, a solidly sane citizen, would also have participated in the crime. Herewe have entered Shirley Jackson territory: the small town as killing machine.Perhaps only a nation in the throes of its own ongoing revenge tragedy could beexpected to swallow this as a plot resolution.
I understand all the fuss about Gosford Park (you have only to read the cast list to do that), but I certainly don't agree with it. This is low-level Robert Altman, Altman on vacation, and not a terribly fun vacation at that.
I get the joke on the classic upstairs-downstairs plot; in this version,all the downstairs people are recognizable individuals, whereas we have troubletelling the upstairs twits apart. And I get the joke on the classic country-housemurder mystery, complete with stupid police inspector--though Peter Sellers wasalways far funnier than Stephen Fry is here. The problem is, I can't see muchdifference between the movies being satirized and the movie that is satirizingthem.
Perhaps there are a few people left in the world who do not recognize thelong-lost-orphan plot when it first rears its hoary head, and who are notexcessively familiar with the concept of a body that has been murdered twice--andif so, they must be the people who are yukking it up in the audience. To them Isay: You are not watching enough trash if you can mistake this for a high-classmovie.
As for the rest of you, you may want to go to Gosford Park for Maggie Smith's inimitably comic line readings, Emily Watson's genuinely appealing portrayal of a maid, and a lot of interesting esoterica on the mechanisms of service in a great house circa 1932. But don't go expecting Nashville or Short Cuts. That Altman is still away on vacation.
