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Written by John Irving, Tod Williams; directed by Tod Williams; starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger. Released to DVD on December 14, 2004.  Sometimes esoteric and visually dramatic films are poignant and touching. Other times, their obscurity serves only to alienate the audience. The Door in the Floor is one project that falls into the latter category. While the movie tries to be metaphorical and profound, it ends up being simply uninteresting.
Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger star in this adaptation of John Irving’s book, A Widow for One Year. It is the story of a family who, fourteen years later, is still dealing with the deaths of two sons. Bridges plays Ted Cole, a writer of classic children’s books, including one called The Door in the Floor. Cole has scruffy gray facial hair, a penchant for casual nakedness around other characters, and has lost his driver’s license due to his excessive drinking; he is larger-than-life, in a decidedly Hemingway fashion. He and his wife Marion (Basinger), live in the Hamptons with their four-year old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning).
This film focuses on the Coles during the summer when a seventeen-year old, aspiring writer named Eddie (Jon Foster) comes to stay. After Eddie and Marion begin a passionate, Oedipal-esque affair, director Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor takes off. While A Widow for One Year was a disturbing and provocative bestseller, this adaptation tries too hard to be unsettling. The Door in the Floor employs stark, abrupt melodrama in the place of subtly powerful scenes that are backed by real emotion. A flashback of the boys’ fatal car crash is gratuitously violent. Ruth frequently dissolves into jarring, angst-ridden fits. The sexual encounters in the film are devoid of sentimentality and almost violent in their intensity.
One of the reasons the audience doesn’t care about these characters is that it is difficult to empathize with them. With a few exceptions, the characters in The Door in the Floor are despicable. They make selfish choices without any thought about the consequences of their actions. Williams never shows the viewer any bits of compassion or weakness in his characters that might warrant sympathy.
To his credit, however, Williams does get uniquely good performances from his actors. In particular, Fanning’s performance is good because she lacks the self-awareness of her cuteness, making her performance here seem all the more natural. Basinger, too, is excellent. She is subtle and beaten down as the conflicted, negligent mother who ends up pursuing a relationship with a boy who looks just like her dead son.
The actors’ performances are superb and the film does look beautiful, but Williams’ style is off-putting. Bombarding the audience with darkly drawn scenes that have no emotional or plot-driven purpose, the viewers are quickly alienated from the characters, effectively sinking the project.
emily riemer yes, it's true: Kim Basinger once played a character named Prissy Frasier in the movie The Ghost of Flight 701. |
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