Todd Field's In the Bedroom was produced in 2001. I was vaguely aware of the film but felt that its subject matter, grief that turns to murderous rage, was too unpleasant for me, dire content that would likely outweigh any merits in the film, and so I avoided the picture until Field's Tar, a masterpiece, I think, led me look into his earlier work. As I surmised, In the Bedroom, is unsettling and very bleak, but the film is so beautifully made and persuasively acted that it's worth watching. Field is a reticent and tactful director and he knows when to cut away from a sequence that is becoming unsustainably grim. In the Bedroom, based upon a short story called "Killings" by Andre Dubus, is a little bit thin and pretty predictable -- but the film is wonderfully detailed and evocative. (Dubus was a lifelong paranoic after his daughter was raped and carried firearms on his person -- he almost shot someone in a scuffle involving his son Andre Dubus III, also a well-known writer, and so the subject of the movie, vigilante justice, is uncomfortably close to the bone.)
In Camden, Maine, a doctor, Matt Fowler (TomWilkenson) leads an idyllic life with his wife, a music professor specializing in Bulgarian folk music. The town seems to be dominated by two "town and gown" institutions (a bit like Northfield, Minnesota) -- there is a seafood packing plant owned by the Strout family and an expensive private college. Matt, whose father was a lobster fisherman, and his wife, Ruth, played brilliantly by Sissy Spacek, have a single, much-beloved son, Frank. Frank is applying to colleges, probably Harvard and Yale, and this will likely be his last summer in town. The young man is handsome, successful with the ladies (he says he's had many girlfriends) and involved in a relationship with a much older woman, Nanette (Marisa Tomei). Nanette has two sons and Frank is close to them, so close in fact that the Fowlers have erected a swing set in their yard on which the children can play. Frank regards the affair as a summertime dalliance, although it's pretty obvious that he loves Nanette and her children. His plan is to go away to school and end the relationship. Unfortunately, Nanette is still married to her abusive and jealous husband, the scion of the Strout family, Richard. Richard is a handsome thug and he is angry that Frank, a "college boy" as he says, is sleeping with his wife and acting as the father to his two little boys. Frank's mother is protective of her son and thinks the romance with Nanette is a major mistake -- she urges Frank to break it off with Nanette. Richard beats up Frank, cutting his eye badly. Paradoxically, this makes Frank more attached to Nanette and her boys and, in fact, he contemplates staying in town and turning his side-gig of lobster fishing into a full-time job. However,at last, it seems that he has decided to attend college and, in fact, is speaking to the admission's office when Nanette calls him and says that Richard has smashed up her house and is threatening her. Frank runs to her defense and ends up with his brains splattered on the floor after he is shot by Richard. This is the film's turning point, about one-third of the way through the movie.
Dr. Fowler and his wife are devastated by the murder of their only son. No one witnessed the killing and Nanette's versions of the event are confused and inconsistent. Richard is released on bail and goes to work bartending in a spooky kind of beach board-walk strip in a nearby town. Ruth encounters Richard in town at a store and thinks the young man is grinning at her -- in fact, he seems distressed at seeing Frank's mother and his expression is anguished and hard to interpret. After a horrific fight involving mutual recriminatios between husband and wife, Matt plots with one of his close friends to take justice into his own hands. The friend has a large tract of woodland on a peninsula. Matt abducts Frank at gunpoint and takes him to his friend's forest where the young man is shot. Matt and his friend bury the boy in the muck during a thunderstorm. Before dawn, returning to Camden, Matt and his buddy are stopped at turnbridge where, presumably, the operator of the structure identifies them driving around inexplicably at 4:30 in the morning. (The implication is that Matt and his friend will be apprehended, but this is left uncertain.) Matt returns to his home where his wife asks him if he has committed the crime as she has apparently demanded. (Female lobsters are larger and more aggressive than the male and when a female bearing eggs encounters a male she often rips off its claws.) Matt crawls into the bed, on the verge of a breakdown, and the film ends with suitably melancholy shots of the empty streets and silent homes in the cold, grey light of dawn.
The film's subject is fairly obvious and the plotting is predictable. That said, Field invests the movie with many impressive details and the film is very evocative of its place on the Maine coastline. Field, here,seems influenced by Bresson and there are many short scenes that end in fades to black -- tiny vignettes that dramatize the grief and anger of the bereft parents. There are curious details -- a panning shot of Nanette's folk song choir, all girls, shows one of the young women with an eye that seems badly damaged. A few minutes later, we see Frank lying dead on the floor at Nanette's house with his skull ripped open and an eye, it seems, on the carpet. Before Matt departs on his mission of vengeance, the girls in Ruth's choir perform a concert, the girls all clad in virginal white marching in a candle-light procession across the grass to the amphitheater overlooking the harbor where they will sing. A pastor tries in vain to comfort Ruth. He describes a vision of a women who have lost children in a mournful ring around the earth (it's like a foreshadowing of the girls with candles at the concert). But, we understand that Ruth is inconsolable and, in fact, we react with her to the pastor's words: it's one thing to have lost a child, another to have lost a child to murder. (This is never said but we understand this point implicitly). Ruth, like Tar in Field's later film, is a music conductor and perfectionist. Matt accuses her of abusing Frank and never being satisfied with him. Ruth has started the vicious fight by accusing her husband of secretly lusting after the beautiful and sexually promiscuous Nanette and, for his own vicarious satisfaction, encouraging the mesalliance. The quarrel is so intense that we expect it to erupt into physical violence -- this is cringeworthy and makes the point that men and women are always on the verge of beating one another up, either emotionally or with fists. As in Bresson, the film features three sequences of people interacting with machines -- shots that have a detailed immediacy: we see how lobsters are caught in traps (a trapped lobster is said to be "In the Bedroom"), watch the canning process at the Strout factory, a place that is always at the edge of the frame or looming on the horizon, and, at last, see how the turnbridge gear works to rotate the span so that vessels can pass through the channel. This latter sequence foreshadows the scene near the end of the movie in which the two murderers are trapped in an early morning queue of vehicles at the channel. When the killers are digging Richard's grave, a twig snaps and the men turn around to see a large deer browsing the meadow. Field is a very restrained film maker -- his compositions are very precise and exact. He understands that every shot and every sequence doesn't need to be a visual aria -- this is unlike some directors like Terry Gilliam and, occasionally, Martin Scorsese. When Field wants to make a visual point, however, he is tremendously ingenious and effective. A short shot showing Richard's corpse wrapped in canvas and dragged in the red glare of taillights of an ATV or small jeep is horrifying. In the final scene, Dr. Fowler lies in bed; Ruth has taken up smoking (with characteristic specificity, we see that she smokes Marlboro Lites) -- the cigarette on the bedside table makes Matt's chest seem to fume like a volcano; he can't get comfortable in his bed and Field uses dissolves to make it look as if he is physically decomposing before our eyes. Matt is oppressed by the pictures that he saw posted on Richard's wall, several drawings by his children and, most importantly, a picture of Richard with Nanette that seems to show that the two of them were genuinely in love. (The film's opening shows a young couple, as yet unidentified to us, frolicking in a flowery meadow by the sea. I wondered if this couple was Nanette with Richard, or with Matt and, so, I rewatched the beginning of the film to answer my questions about this sequence -- it's characteristic of Field's movies that they raise questions in the viewer that makes him or her immediately want to re-watch the picture. In this case, it really doesn't matter as to whether it is Richard or Matt with the young woman -- the point is the lovers are fungible; one can stand in for the other, although when this happens chaos ensues.) In the Bedroom is grim but worth watching for its beauty and intelligence and Oscar-worthy acting.
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