WHO'S AFRAID OF SISSY SPACEK? 'In the Bedroom'. - movie review

Writer Andre Dubus, who died in 1999, never became a big name with the general public. But he was revered by other writers, a storyteller whose fictions mixed quiet dismay with unexpected moments of transcendence, and whose Catholic ethos infused his New England mill town settings with an earnest, obdurate impulse toward grace.

Todd Field's In the Bedroom is that rare creature, a film that takes a good work of literature and makes it better. (If you haven't seen the movie, you might save this review for afterward, because I'm about to give away the plot.) The movie derives from a Dubus short story, "Killings," set in a small town in coastal Maine, and for those of you who disregarded my advice, here's the plot: A middle-aged doctor and his teacher wife, Matt and Ruth Fowler (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek), are living with their son, Frank (Nick Stahl), a bright twenty-two-year-old spending a post-college-graduation summer working as a lobsterman while enjoying a tender fling with a thirtyish local woman, Natalie (Marisa Tomei). The flirtatious and frankly sexy Natalie has two small sons and a jealous, estranged husband, Richard (William Mapother), who considers her his property and wants her back. Richard provokes several increasingly violent encounters; and then one day, in an enraged confrontation at Natalie's house, he pulls a gun and kills Frank. An utterly routine summer implodes in anguish.

In the Bedroom is a canny adaptation. While remaining true to the events of Dubus's story, and using much of its dialogue, Field enlarges the emphasis and changes the feel, making it far more generous. Dubus's muted brand of Iron John macho has been expunged; where the story deployed its killing quickly and took up the mechanics and metaphysics of revenge, Field lets us spend time with the Fowler family before Frank's death. We get to know Ruth, a high school music teacher with a Ph.D., the sort of culturally ambitious person--surely an immigrant from someplace like Cambridge (her license plate reads "Art Gal")--who has her tenth-grade choir singing Bosnian music; and Matt, local boy made good, a friendly town doctor who's happy playing cards with the workingmen he grew up among. Ruth's and Matt's are the kind of dissimilarities that make for easy marital repartee in good times, even as they point to potential conflict in bad. When, after a fistfight in which Natalie's husband opens a cut on Frank's face serious enough to require stitches, the two disagree about calling the cops--Matt can't bring himself to think it's a manly thing to do--you feel a shiver, knowing that the seed of a future agonized moment of blame has just been sown.

The early scenes of the film are drenched in a convergence-of-the-twain anticipation of disaster, the violent husband drawing ever closer not merely to Frank, but to Matt and Ruth themselves, or rather to their happiness--their glow of unexamined satisfaction, that falls just short of complacency. Director Field takes his cue from a single line, early in Dubus's story, describing Matt's abiding faith in "the small pleasures he believed he had earned...the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood." In the Bedroom serves up these quietly pleasurable days, showing the innocent fun of a picnic with family and friends, or of Frank and Matt taking Natalie's boys out lobstering. In bed Matt and Ruth lie reading and knitting at night, and their talk segues into gentle sexual teasing. Uninsistently, Field sets up the deep, comfortable harmonies of happy middle age--the orderly universe of work and family that is about to be violently disordered. It's a fine treatment, far gentler than Dubus's, of the illusion that we can indeed earn happiness.

After the horror of the killing, In the Bedroom radically changes pace, assuming a look and feel of anguish--short takes with little dialogue, and long fade-outs that are like black borders around muted vignettes of grief. Ruth sorts through the mail, coming across a sweepstakes offering for Frank; Matt visits his son's room for the first time, where the pillow still bears an indentation from the boy's head: these are snapshots of unbearable pain. "It comes in waves, and then nothing," Ruth says to the family minister. "I feel so angry." The isolation of grief drives husband and wife apart; they pass one another wordlessly in the house, tight-lipped and grim. Ruth, we understand, is holding in an ocean of rage (Spacek's haggard face as she sits chain-smoking and staring blankly at late-night TV is a harrowing study in anguish), and finally it all comes pouring out. She blames her husband: for not calling the cops; for not wanting a second child back when they could have had one; for being unfeeling in the wake of their son's death; and, most perilously, for having used Frank to satisfy his own vicarious fantasies of Natalie. "Frank died," she spits at him, "for your fantasy piece of ass." It's breathtaking, the furious, crazed comprehensiveness of blame. And Matt gives back blow for blow. Frank could never talk to Ruth, he charges; and if their son turned to a girl like Natalie, it's Ruth who is to blame: "he went there because of you--because you are so controlling, so overbearing." Their son was never good enough for her, he accuses. "Everything he did was wrong to you, Ruth.... Sometimes I can hardly look at you." Their marriage becomes a terrible mutual prosecution.

In the Bedroom is a distinctly literary film, and not merely because Matt's poker buddies have a habit of quoting Blake and Longfellow. It gives us people rather than plot, and gives them in the fullness of mixed motives. Field and his co-screenwriter, Robert Festinger, keep digging down into the individual agendas that lie beneath family life. For instance, when Ruth fears that her son's involvement with Natalie will derail his success (he's supposed to go to graduate school in the fall), she's saying that staying to marry in one's small hometown equals failure--and implicitly casting herself as both agent and symbol of Matt's success. Matt, meanwhile, a fisherman's son himself, is living vicariously through his son; when he spends his lunch breaks hustling down to the docks to see him, we understand he's assessing the life he might have lived, including the kind of passionate, uncomplicated woman he might have ended up with if he hadn't married an ambitious and high-strung outsider. His fantasies aren't really sexual so much as existential.

There is nothing sinister about any of this. Indeed, such realities form the undercurrents of any family's life; only in the aftermath of disaster do they become toxic. The brilliant insight of this movie is to reveal how the routine complexities of family life are criminalized by grief: how the usual ways in which we construe and position one another for our own emotional needs--the deep themes of our interactions with one another--are remorselessly pushed to the surface and made the material of explicit charge and countercharge. The accusations Ruth and Matt hurl at one another are terrible distortions. "No one should have to hear that kind of thing," Matt says, apologizing afterward; and yet there's no way around it. Matt and Ruth are healthy, sane, essentially happy people of good will driven wild by grief. In the Bedroom does what good art does with awful predicaments: You feel the dread of knowing not only that this could be you, but that it would be.

The last third of the film follows the frustrating unraveling of the criminal case against the ex-husband, and Matt's deliberations over whether to take matters into his own hands. It is the least compelling part of the movie, perhaps because it is the least consequential. Vengeance may hold a primitive necessity, but it offers neither redemption nor relief. Forgiveness is both irrelevant--the film's ending is animated not by Christian theology, but by the psychodynamics of loss--and impossible. In the Bedroom makes it clear that Matt and Ruth have been irrevocably damaged. While the film's opening scene showed Natalie and Frank cavorting in a sunny summer field--"I'm in love with you," she says, "I can feel my life, you know?"--it closes with what might be the saddest sunrise ever captured on film. To live is to feel, and to feel is to love; but by the end of this somber meditation on grief and family, there's nothing left but the numbed sensation of loss.

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