Directed by Todd Field
Review by Kevin Murphy
There’s an Irish pub in Boston called the Crossroads. It’s the type of place that smells of cigarettes five years after the smoking ban.
One night my professor, Andre Dubus III, and I went for a beer. He explained that his father, celebrated short story writer Andre Dubus, and Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, used to frequent and drink together, years before when Yates was living nearby.
I expressed my admiration for his father’s writing. Then Dubus III told me a secret: Killings, his father’s short story, was being made into a film.
I remembered the characters in the story: Matt Fowler, Strout, and Mary Ann. I recalled the line, “Then Matt went to him and shot him once in the back of the head.” I remembered the story’s taut revolution, its exposition of eruptive family rage, and how it displayed Dubus’s staggering literary powers.
The story’s writing is crisp, fluid, penetrating; at the end, it’s as if somebody sucker punched you in the belly: a testament to a short story’s success.
Dubus III was concerned, though. Much of it would have to be inflated for the story to become a film script. But he was certain the characters’ depth would allow the screenwriters ( Rob Festinger and Todd Field) to develop enough range and subplots to fill the visual void.
The name for the movie would not be Killings, but rather In the Bedroom. The title is a slippery reference to the space where lobsters wait after being caught in a trap. In the movie, Matt Fowler (Tom Wilkinson) explains the business of a lobster trap by quipping, “If you get more than two in the bedroom, you’re bound for trouble.”
This line summarizes the circumstances that involve his college-age son, Frank (Nick Stahl), and Nick’s older girlfriend Natalie (Marisa Tomei), as they frolic and try to raise Natalie’s two young boys, all the while avoiding her creepy, aggressive ex-husband.
Todd Field, who’s also directed Little Children, forged a full-bodied screenplay from Dubus’s slim story. Much of Dubus’s style and interests find voice in the movie: northeastern blue-collar workers and their struggle with alcohol, religion and love are portrayed with intelligence, humor, and sympathy. The result is a resonant, gripping experience, a slow-burning movie with quality to savor.
Characters have more attention and space to grow. The plot is spread out, moving much slower than the story. Where Killings delivers a sucker punch, In the Bedroom seduces, abducts, and in the end delivers what you’ve come to expect: vengeance, regret, and duplicity.
The direction is understated and calm; many critics have declared it some of the best work done in recent American cinema. In one affecting scene, the camera zooms on Matt’s face as he listens to his lawyer. The lawyer’s voice is drained out, and Matt listens to his lawyer’s pocket change rather than his advice. The scene represents Matt’s gradual disillusion with the law, his progression towards acting on his own, and also captures the details that work to illuminate his state of mind. The director has used one scene to translate pages of psychological prose.
Matt’s isolation strains his marriage, and subsequently lends the movie its drama and urgency. It is easy to relate to grieving parents, easy to understand their anger and sense of helplessness. But it’s difficult to understand Matt’s decision to act. When he decides to kill, he smashes the illusion of kinship he’s forged with the audience, and delivers instead the situation in stark, what would you really do, terms.
Spacek and Wilkinson’s performances are genuine and vital, full of rage and sadness. As we follow along captivated, their survival grows meaningful: their tested willpower and fates become our own.
A dark glow comes over Matt when he finds his justice. The glow expresses his torture: while his son’s death has changed him forever, his stability and moral code have been threatened by what he’s done.
In the Bedroom, unlike many attempts to put literature on the screen, is a triumph of spirit and production. Field fuses so much of Dubus into the movie that it feels natural, at home with the author’s horror, sadness, and unique sense of humanity.
Andre Dubus died in 1999, before the movie was complete. But as I sat with his son, discussing film and writing, his presence filled the room. Around me, the blue-collar guys he so often wrote about sat in the Crossroads. The door swung open and the wind blew in. It was a perfect place for a Dubus story.
Dubus III and I stepped outside and a group of men stood in a circle, smoking. One of the men, barrel-chested and bearded, sharply resembled Dubus.
“Guy looks like my father,” Dubus III said.
The man suddenly looked, as if called, and stared hard into my eyes.
That night, a literary bull pounded the floors. For his efforts, Todd Field has proven an adept matador.
