IN THE BEDROOM
As this is written five months have passed since the World Trade Center tragedy. One increasingly feels that New Yorkers are being given a bum's rush to rush through our mourning. Hardly had the Twin Towers fell, when the media urged us that the healing should begin. The usual suspects were trotted out to instruct us on the appropriate means to "move on", "get closure". The perverse implication of this heavyhanded counsel is that persistent despair, individual or collective, is somehow indecorous.
One recalls Hamlet's bitter rejoinder to his adulterous mother: fresh from her husband's murderer's bed, Gertrude cozily entreats her son not to seek his father in the dust. When death is the ncessary end, why seems this loss so "particular"?:
Hamlet: "Seems, Madam! Nay, it is: I know not "seems"...
I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
The ground zero of such inconsolable grief is the harrowing terrain of Todd Field's accomplished first film, In The Bedroom. It's set in the midcoast Maine town of Camden, during a languorous summer native to the region, the more beautiful for its brevity The establishing sequence shows a couple racing through windblown grass, falling into each others arms, kissing greedily.
The young man, Frank Fowler (Nick Stahl), is about to enter a distant graduate program in architecture. Although in his early twenties, Frank hs the appealing vulnerability of a gangly late adolescent. His lover, Natalie Strout (Marisa Tomei), is about a decade older. She's recently ditched her abusive husband, Richard (William Mapother), the worthless scion of a prosperous cannery owner.
Frank's father, Matt (Tom Wilkinson) is a successful physician, solid as Maine rock, a sturdy man's man. His mother, Ruth (Sissy Spacek), a transplanted sophisticated New Yorker, teaches music at a local college. Her self-effacing facade conceals an astringent intelligence, a brisk assurance of unfailing competence.
One senses Matt always has been irritated by, and attracted to Ruth's tough side. His complacent affability equably balances her tetchiness. As he sees it, he's pretty much lets her have her own way since doing so doesn't compromise his well-ordered life -- his lucrative practise; a lobstering sideline learned in his youth; his lifelong friendships within a klatch of crusty buddies.
The unvoiced arrangements and compromises which sustain reasonably happy partners like the Fowlers' have been stretched thin by Frank's febrile infatuation. Frank deems the liason benign midsummer madness. Ruth acknowledges Natalie's sweetness with cool compassion, but views her as hopelessly out of her social and intellectual depth; a bruised soul with a tarnished reputation to boot. Ruth is concerned the affair may prevent Frank from quitting Camden in the fall. But, typical of the film's complex layering of motivation, she also obscurely intuits that Natalie's meld of ripe sensuality and raw neediness may pose a more immediate danger to her son.
Frank bristles at what he perceives as Ruth's gross manipulations. He secretly confides to Matt that he's indeed thinking of settling down with Natalie, working the lobster traps, becoming the reliable father her kids have lacked. One theorizes Frank's desire to assume the immense burden of caring for this broken family at his tender age is informed by an intense identification with Matt's absolute dependability, as well an abiding affection he shares with Matt for the rugged Maine land- and seascape.
The Fowler's collective crises could easily have comprised the stuff of soap opera. But a superlative script; exceptionally discerning performances (notably by Spacek); Thomas Newman's brooding score; Todd Field's secure grasp of the region and its flinty personalities combine to charge In The Bedroom with the ominous inevitability of a high tragedy, in which personal flaws will mesh lethally with social faultlines.
Inflamed by jealousy, Natalie's weasle husband barges into her home in yet another attempt to either cozen or menace her into a reconciliation. When Frank intervenes, he brutally assaults them both. To Ruth's exasperated amazement neither the couple nor Matt want the police involved (Frank's violence is hardly new, but Natalie clearly never sought a restraining order). A few days later, Natalie phones Frank hysterically. She's barricaded upstairs with the children while Richard rages below. Frank races to her rescue -- and Richard shatters his skull with a single shot.
In The Bedroom documents the devastating impact of Frank's murder upon his grieving parents with excruciating precision. Over the next months, in the uncanny fashion of the newly dead, Frank becomes an intolerable, palpably absent presence. No clear image of him is shown save for a tantalizing glimpse in Matt's mind of the child Frank smiling down at him from a tree. Through Antonio Calvache's lapidary camera work, a Zen-like shimmer of "suchness" seems to emanate from the objects Frank touched, made, loved -- the rumpled bedclothes in his room; drawings for a lobster boat he planned to build; the fishing lures, bobbers, a fragment of green beach glass Matt discovers in a tiny box.
The incarcerated Richard now is claiming Frank accidentally died during a scuffle. Natalie tearfully confesses she only a heard the fatal shot, thus negating her earlier statement to the police that she actually saw Richard murder Frank, and thoroughly compromising her probity. Richard is promptly released on bail his family can readily afford. The retraumatized parents are told by an incompetent (or possibly bought off) DA that Richard can only be convicted of manslaughter. At best, he will serve a few years of soft time.
Justice deferred and denied compounds the unravelling of the Fowlers' marraige. Their escalating estrangement is encapsulated in an extraordinary sequence of brief domestic scenes, hallmarked by incisive Hopperesque visuals; by a few laconic words giving way to lingering, agonizing silence.
On the surface, Matt seems to have adjusted better to his son's loss than Ruth. He immerses himself in household chores, returns to his practise and his friends' solace. Ruth becomes consumed in training a girls' chorus to sing wild, dirge-like Balkan folk music at the town's annual Labor Day festivities. At home she retreats into reproachful isolation, chainsmoking before the lulling gabble of trash TV.
The Fowlers' icy detente is finally shattered when Ruth glimpses Richard while shopping and returns home, furious. Her quarrel with Matt is arguably the most acutely observed depiction of marital dysharmony and its resolution since Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage. The Fowlers flay each other with the wounding insights which are only divulged by long intimacy, and carefully shielded from one's partner under kinder circumstances.
Ruth blames Matt for encouraging the affair to savor a middle-age, proxy pleasure from Frank's scoring the local sexpot; and for utterly closing himself off to her after the murder with his customary stoicism. Matt rails at Ruth about her relentless, elitist criticism of Frank -- which he infers drove Frank into an unchallenging relationship with a docile child-woman. On the cusp of irreparable harm, they suddenly embrace in tears, tacitly acknowledge they've been flailing at each other rather than admit their impotence before the catastrophe of Frank's death.
A conventional narrative would have had the reconciled Fowlers start to put their lives back together. No such facile recuperation occurs. By helping Matt break through his perennial supression of feeling, Ruth has opened him up to his enormous rage, and his guilt about compelling her to suffer alone. He kidnaps Richard to a distant cabin with the help of his best friend, clumsily executes him and buries the body.
The "bedroom" in the film's title refers to the netted, baited compartment of a lobster trap. Early in the film, Matt tells Frank that two male lobsters entangled "in the bedroom" will claw each other to death. Jean Cocteau characterized the Oedipus tragedy as an 'infernal machine'. The obvious mainspring of the film's hellish machinery is Richard's brute masculine aggression, conflated with paranoid competitiveness, which makes him slaughter Frank for invading his bedroom. Natalie has provided the all too available, if consciously unwitting bait in this particular Oedipal trap.
But Field also subtly intimates that Richard's yahoo savagery is the most pathological -- and inescapable -- manifestation of the macho sensibility which pervades and distortes Camden's social structure. The film subtly articulates companionable male bonding like Matt's lobstering with his son, or Matt's poker game of many years, with the ruthless exercise of male prerogative by the patriarchal town rulers (the most powerful may well be Richard's unseen father). In this world women exist only to serve, to console -- or, in Natalie's case, to tempt. One surmises that Ruth, a perennial outsider, years ago quickly understood and made token accomodation to the repressive status quo -- but fervently hoped she could help her son escape it.
Natalie's ferocious interrogation by a male top legal gun,
combined with behind-the-scenes collusion by Camden's masculine oligarchy, puts Richard back on the street instead of behind bars. The spirit of macho gunfighter revenge is then ignighted anew, this time in Matt, that most unviolent of souls. After Richard's maladroit execution, Matt returns home, profoundly troubled. Ruth unambivalently approves of what he's done -- betokening her own fall from moral grace. On the verge of escaping into sleep, he mentions a picture he saw in Richard's bedroom of Richard and Natalie, happily embracing. "I don't know", Matt mutters, his last words and the last in the film, as he turns definitively from his wife.
"When you kill a man, you take away all he's got, all he'll ever get," declares Will Munny, the anti-hero gunslinger of Clint Eastwood's revisionist western Unforgiven. Matt has plunged into an existential void by grasping the stark significance of taking away the plenitude of Richard's life, regardless of the latter's baseness.
Whether Matt will be caught is beside the point. The retribution which supposedly would have redressed Frank's death has only escalated its unredeemability. Complicity in Richard's death has made it impossible to solace each other over their son's loss. Hopelessly alienated, each is now bound on King Lear's wheel of fire -- "where my own tears do scald like molten lead..."