IN THE BEDROOM (2001)
dir. Todd Field, based on a short story by Andre Dubus, with Sissy Spacek as Ruth Fowler and Tom Wilkinson as Matt Fowler
I saw In The Bedroom when it came out; was definitely too young to take in what it really was.
It’s about as ambitious, and shattering, a film as there is—an attempt to go right to the heart of grief, to really understand what happens to parents when they lose a child, and, at the same time, to create a work of art that’s as embronzed, as eternal, as any Greek myth.
At the time I saw In The Bedroom I hadn’t lost anyone. A few years after that I lost a friend who was around the same age as Frank, similarly a golden boy, and whose parents reacted very much as Frank’s did—the mother who talked about nothing else, the father who never talked about it. Internally, I pictured the marriage as looking a bit like Matt and Ruth’s—the impossibility of communicating; the never-ending recriminating, second-guessing; the never-ending misery. The sense that everything in the world reminded them of their son; that everything in the world had curdled on them.
And In The Bedroom, in its grippingly intense, small town-ish way, does offer some kind of a path towards peace and closure. Which is a very Greek sense of things—that if your son is murdered by someone else in the town then, eventually, as part of the grieving process, you need to coolly, deliberately execute your son’s murderer.
In the world that Field and Dubus create, a bloodied finger actually can close up and heal. It actually is possible to get away with a clean murder. A grieving mother actually can love her husband again—can make him his morning coffee and a hearty breakfast—when he comes home having finally done the deed. It’s a very different vision from anything in the culture—which is all about forgiveness, moving-on, being healthy, letting time heal grief. In In The Bedroom, however—which is the same perspective as Clytemnestra’s or Medea’s—certain crimes are unforgivable; certain griefs only dealt with by returning to the source and closing the circle. It becomes clear after not too long that that’s the only possible way to handle loss on this scale. “Did you ever think about moving away?” Willis, Matt’s friend, asks him. “Yeah, we did, it wouldn’t matter,” says Matt. “No one should ever have to hear stuff like that,” says Matt to Ruth when the two of them have fully broken the ice, had their major fight. And Ruth replies, “No, you’re right, Matt, I am horrible”—in other words, they have gotten to the psychic floor, to a place where all the usual American coping mechanisms are unavailing; and which calls for a treatment that is more Old World i.e. revenge, blood passion. It’s very fitting that Ruth is the conductor of a Balkan chorus. And it’s fully appropriate, in this world, that the attempt at reconciliation by Natalie—such an important figure in the whole tragedy—is met with a hard slap by Ruth, who then puts her headphones back on, listens to her Balkan music (and that’s the last we ever hear from Natalie).
Every scene in In The Bedroom—and the same could be said for every scene in all three of Field’s films—is a masterpiece. Every shot perfectly composed. Every line significant, resonant. The scene of scenes in In The Bedroom is a regular poker game played after Frank’s murder—a silence falling on the group at the moment when Matt, as is his habit, dawdles too long looking at his cards. “Say something for chrissake,” says Matt. “Quit pussyfooting around me. ‘You want me to stare at these cards all night?’” At which point all the other poker players, in unison, look to Carl, an otherwise unimportant character, who happens to know swathes of poetry by heart, and Carl recites:
There are things of which I cannot speak
There are thoughts that may not die
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak
And bring a pallor into the cheek and a mist before the eye
And the words of that fatal song come over me like a chill
A boy’s will
Is the wind’s will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts
I don’t entirely know why that poem is the perfect poem for the moment, for the movie. Why the image that stays with Matt in the end—the sole loose end of his crime, so to speak—is a photograph of Richard and Natalie hanging on Richard’s bathroom wall. And Matt can’t explain it either. “What, Matt, what?” Ruth asks him. And Matt replies simply, accurately, “I don’t know.” The point is that there’s something not quite contained in the tidy circle of the revenge drama—something about youth, the infinitude of youth, the joys of not knowing what life brings, that have a resonance and immortality all of their own.