IN THE BEDROOM
© 2001 Miramax Films

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IN THE BEDROOM

In one way, the comparison to the excruciatingly repressed characters in ORDINARY PEOPLE is unfair to the Fowlers. Doctor Matt (Tom Wilkinson) and high school music teacher Ruth (Sissy Spacek) are genuinely loving toward one another, as well as to their college student son Frank (Nick Stahl), who is spending the summer as a lobster fisherman before going off to graduate school to study architecture. The strains are subtle. Ruth is afraid that Frank's affair with Natalie (Marisa Tomei), a townie cashier and mother of two, will derail his academic plans. Ruth also wishes that Matt would share her concerns, while father and son both feel that Ruth is being something of a pain about the whole business. There's also trouble with Natalie's estranged husband Richard (William Mapother), who wants to get back together with his wife.

Even if one knows what's coming, the fleeting but pivotal violence is shocking Field creates a sense that this really is the kind of thing that can throw a recognizable, orderly universe out of whack. The reactions of the characters to sudden tragedy are so realistic that we tend to share them we go through numbness, grief and rage, along with flinching when they turn on one another emotionally. Finally, we understand how, in this seemingly civilized environment, the climax can come about.

Spacek as Ruth almost lets us read the character's mind, even (or perhaps especially) when she is controlling her expression to maintain a polite veneer. She gives us the cordial front, the layer of protective disapproval that she allows herself to acknowledge and the seething mess underneath that Ruth wishes to deny, all at once and often without words. Wilkinson is splendid as Matt, a man so used to his own go-along, get-along nature that he gives us a sense of almost physical pain as he recognizes glacial, inevitable changes in himself. Stahl, Tomei and Mapother are all likewise excellent.

Most movies grappling with violence in suburbia have third acts that frequently turn into either courtroom drama or a variation on HALLOWEEN. IN THE BEDROOM does neither. Whether or not we identify directly with Ruth and/or Matt both of them are depicted so specifically that we are quick to notice the areas where they discourage empathy, as well as where they invite it we believe in them. IN THE BEDROOM is made with the kind of skill and intelligence that lets us imagine what it would be like if our own lives were affected by the events it chronicles. It is one of those films that makes us feel as though we've been through something real.