In the Bedroom

Christian Century, Feb 13, 2002 by Phil Christman

In the Bedroom: Todd Field's movie explores a small-town marriage suddenly exploded by grief. The painful vignettes of the film's middle third make it one of the year's most impressive and intense. Watching Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek as parents grieving for their son, the viewer grimaces, as if to make up for the cavernous gap between them. When, inevitably, the big fight comes, one is stunned but utterly convinced by its brutality.

Spacek's and Wilkinson's performances set such a high bar and Field manages the subsurface tension of domestic scenes so well that the rest of the film can hardly fare as well in comparison. But there is still much to praise. Bedroom is another in a growing number of films that examine the consequences of one violent act in a small town. As with Fargo (1996) and its evocative but humorless cousin A Simple Plan (1998), part of the film offers a careful rendering of a locale--in this case, a small town in Maine. We watch crab fishing, summer cookouts, card games--and the photography, by Antonio Calvache, is beautiful.

Field and screenwriter Robert Festinger (taking off from a story by the late Andre Dubus) manage to convey the infuriatingly stubborn quality that the physical world takes on during periods of pain, the way a fly buzzing or a yammering television set can seem to symbolize the whole careless universe. When the local Catholic priest tries to comfort Spacek, reminding her that her grief is not unique by telling a story about a woman similarly bereaved, she asks an irrelevant question about the woman, sealing the conversation back from the universal to the particular: trapped inside her loss, only particular situations seem real.

Toward the end, the film strangely turns into a revenge drama. The film doesn't quite prepare one to believe that Wilkinson's character, a kindly doctor, would behave as he does. But the final moments are haunting, as is the film as a whole.

Phil Christman is a writer in Grand Rapids, Michigan