IN THE BEDROOM
by Mark Netter

Entertainment. That's what we go to the movies for, and that's a rather peculiar word when associated with one particular popular feature playing around the country right now. In the Bedroom is an independent filmmaker's modestly-budgeted achievement - all by itself filling in for the near-total absence of serious dramas, in the theatrical sense, in any recent Hollywood product line. You know the kind, that used to be made with real movie stars who were also really actors, the kind that evolved from more literary traditions through the 1940s to the more brazenly adult material in the 1950s, and ultimately, post-French New Wave, as a slew of hard-hitting, social, exploratory movies by directors like Robert Altman in the 1970s.

Todd Field, co-writer, director, and by all evidence the guy who dreamed up the idea of making a film from the Andre Dubus short story, is not being given much credit as a visionary. Witness the absence of his name from almost all Best Director lists or predictions. This may be a testament to his skill in submerging the authorial voice, but it seems to be getting read as a lack of style. While there's a bit of the dismissive actor-turned-director rap that comes with the territory - often earned by use of longer lenses and longer takes that favor the actor's process rather than brilliantly conceived shots that favor the camera's extremes - in Field's case it is particularly intriguing due to his notable association with the late Stanley Kubrick.

An admitted Kubrick fan from youth, Field had perhaps the pivotal role in Stanley's last movie, Eyes Wide Shut. Nick Nightingale, journeyman party pianist with a family back west, is a dusky, ambivalent, potentially demonic conduit for the main character and the plot, and the casting of Field was interesting due to how his slightly devilish looks were completely tempered by his low-key, naturalistic performance. You both sympathized with Nick, and knew that he was leading the protagonist straight to hell.

In the Bedroom is actually two completely different movie-going experiences. There's the one in the theater where, about 35 minutes in, you get your scar. Then there's the experience of living with the scar and reflecting on it. In the former, Field deftly shocks the audience by making our emotional connection to the key characters so strong that, even knowing what happens as I did before going in, you can't help but enter grief mode. Imagine entire theaters all over America where, every day, people are grieving for an hour and a half together.

But what Field restores to the popular screen with In the Bedroom is ritual as it is practiced in life. Rather than the movie-movie rituals of explosions or manipulated sentiment or judging the latest CGI, we are at a funeral. The parents in the film (played by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek) have suddenly been robbed of their son Frank, shot to death by his lover's estranged husband. From this point on, the film patiently follows the progression of bereavement. What makes the rest of the movie work is something slightly literary, a question of balance and perspective. There is enough of a question left at the end of Field's movie to spark at least a little discussion, and while it may not be the second coming of Ingmar Bergman just yet (some critics have noted the resemblance, also notable in relation to Kubrick, who had a great admiration for the Swedish filmmaker), it sticks in the mind and provides a route to reflect on the movie and provide closure.

The grief is still so strong at the end of the film that I felt like I'd missed some of the intervening scenes, or at least had no time to form solid analytical opinions of what had happened. I found myself thinking the movie had somehow taken an easy way out in the latter half, with too much expository dialogue, and an ending trying to have it both ways. Subsequently, and after some very brief but key discussions with others who had seen it, I think I have a better handle on the essential nature of the movie. In some ways it was harder to see because Field's subtle directorial style has its perfect echo in Tom Wilkinson's transparent lead performance. The movie is ultimately the father's story.

One of the film's strongest scenes is when the father comes to the school, arrives right outside the auditorium where the mother (a music teacher) is rehearsing the school choir - the moment he prepares to tell her that her only child has been murdered. Field spares us the melodrama of the next moment, and practices the same method several times thereafter, cutting away at the exact last moment beyond which we could stand no more. The key is that we are mainly with the father. As the next act develops it is he who will achieve, unlike his wife, a fair degree of equilibrium over the tragedy. At the end of the movie they have switched places, she in Lady Macbeth-like equipoise, he a simmering mess, making the whole first act an extended set-up, a prologue, and the meaning to be mined from the father's grief the real point of the movie. This film is about a man getting turned around and sent straight to hell, all for the best possible reasons in the world.

We may find ourselves sympathizing with the wife, agreeing with her anger and lack of comfort in the aftermath of her son's murder. We may go so far as to agree with her that her husband has to do something, anything, that his equilibrium is a lie and a crime. At the end of the movie, however, it is evident that the father has gotten sideswiped by his humanity. The movement from the man in the auditorium doorway to the man who gets into bed at the break of dawn hardens some sort of scar tissue in the psyche of both character and audience. What ultimately doesn't destroy him at the end of the first act nails him in the last.

Is Field's subtlety of style - creating the impression that such a clearly effective and worthy movie seems un-authorial in use of the camera - true brilliance or just a laudable achievement on such a small budget? His feat with the actors is unquestionable, putting together a varied and impressive cast, then getting career-high work out of them. But aside from some well-placed but never showy shots here and there, is there "cinema" in the camera direction of In the Bedroom? It may take subsequent movies written and directed by Field, when he has greater technical resources at his disposal, to get an answer. Or maybe it will come from a body of work, in retrospective. But that second movie-going experience with In the Bedroom, that lingering scar and rumination, is tribute enough to Field's idol and director. Perhaps Stanley Kubrick was more fantastic from the get-go, his camera more ambitious or astonishing than the style Todd Field has utilized in his first feature. Yet like the old master's movies, this, Field's first, lingers hard. Could this be Nick Nightingale underplaying again?

©2002 Mark Netter
CineScene