This is a first time feature effort from actor-turned-director Todd Field (Nick Nightingale in Eyes Wide Shut). On this showing, we can expect an interesting directorial career (and he proved it with his follow-up Little Children). In the Bedroom is an assured debut based on the short stories of Field’s friend Andre Dubus, who died just before the film’s release.
It’s the story of a middle class couple in a small town in Maine whose lives are dragged off course by their son’s disastrous love affair. Matt Fowler (fine English actor Tom Wilkinson) is the local GP and his wife Ruth (Sissy Spacek) teaches singing. They enjoy an undramatic, if somewhat weighed down, married life. Their gifted but listless son Frank (Nick Stahl) has fallen for an older woman called Natalie (Marisa Tomei in a great performance). Unfortunately Natalie hasn’t shaken off the malign influence of her belligerent husband Richard, and it is Richard’s domestic violence that is the catalyst for the tragedy.
Spacek’s raw and steely performance is reminiscent of Tilda Swinton in The Deep End, which this superficially resembles. But really the film plays much more like Redford’s Ordinary People. Tragic eruptions have a habit of exposing the cracks even in the most settled of lives.
Long, slow and deliberate, but the acting here is about as good as it gets.
Filmink 4/5
