IN THE BEDROOM

Rating: 5

Don’t jump to any conclusions in the first 15 minutes or so of IN THE BEDROOM about where it’s heading. Though the acting is all very fine and the direction skillful, you might thing that you have pretty much figured out everything that’s going to happen after the first 10 minutes or so.  And then something remarkable happens.  Everything that you were expecting happens in the first 45 minutes, and then the film examines in searing, very human terms, the aftermath of a senseless tragedy and how agonizing the implications of the phrase “life goes on” can be.
That would be what happens to the Fowlers, Matt and Ruth, played by Tom Wilkerson and Sissy Spacek, at the inadvertent hands of Natalie, a divorcee with two kids and an unstable ex-husband who becomes the summer romance of the Fowler’s teenage son, Matt.  Played by Marisa Tomei, a tough yet vulnerable woman whose life is as unruly as her perpetually tousled hair.  As Richard, her creepy ex-husband, William Mapother is a spoiled rich kid who takes slimy to new, psychotic levels, leaving no doubt that he will go to any extremes to get his ex back.  When the inevitable happens, everyone saw it coming and no one knew how to stop it, even when Matt came home with a black eye after a skirmish with Richard.  And it is from there that the heartache springs.  The terrible second-guessing and lost chances to avoid the violence that took Matt’s life is followed by a poetic justice that is as awful as it is cathartic.
Todd Field, in his directorial debut captures the nuances by letting the silences between words carry the story. He uses the face of Natalie’s older son, Jason.  It lights up with adoration when he looks at Matt, falls silently into despair when he talks about going back to college, and, finally, watches Fowler, his ersatz grandfather, from a distance after the murder, longing for the old relationship with him and knowing that it won’t happen. Fields sums up the great distance yawning between Fowler and his wife, he pours her a cup of tea from a forgotten teapot at her elbow while she stares unseeing at the television, chain-smoking and silent in the flickering light.  He shows Spacek dropping her eyes as a well-meaning friend talks about her grandchildren, the awkward silence between them reminding Spacek and us that there won’t be any for the Fowlers. There are no words to convey that kind of loss. It is significant that we never hear the news of that murder broken to Fowlers.  The camera cuts away just before the words are spoken, leaving we in the audience, who know what it coming, to ponder the last moment of the Fowler’s old lives before it is snatched from them.  
Now, let me say up front how very happy I am that Sissy Spacek is getting the recognition that she so richly deserves for this film. As the grieving mother of an only son cut down in his prime, she delivers one her finest performances and one that she will be hard pressed to top, but it is not the finest in the film.  That would be Tom Wilkinson’s, which is one of the best that I’ve seen by any actor or actress in any genre in any medium in all my years of casting a critical eye on these things, both as a professional and a civilian. Let me say more, I’ve never seen one better. Spacek is great, but it is Wilkinson, with the tougher job of playing the grieving father burying his emotions, that takes pride of place.  It is a work of great intelligence, exquisite sensitivity, and wrenching honesty.  Spacek weeps, she screams, she goes through all the paces with a depth of despair tempered with a steely anger that is truly as frightening as it is heartbreaking.  But Wilkinson, who bared it all in THE FULL MONTY, here bares his very soul as he watches his wife drift away after his son’s murder, the twinkle in his eye replaced by a well of sadness that finds no means of expressing itself.  The invisible and impregnable wall she erects between them all the more devastating after the warm and playful intimacy we saw them share at the beginning of the film. If he isn’t at least nominated for an Oscar, there is no justice.
IN THE BEDROOM evokes such raw and ragged emotions that it is at once painful to watch and impossible to turn away from, becoming a thing of terrible and irresistible beauty.  It is as perfect a piece of filmmaking as you are likely to find this or any other year.