"So many of my books are about loss and who accepts loss better than others," noted author John Irving said Saturday to a full audience after a screening of the "Door in the Floor," an adaptation of the first third of his novel, "A Widow For A Year." At the core of the movie are a family's deviant methods of coping with the loss of its two teenage sons in a car accident.
At the beginning of the movie, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), the father, seems to have coped well with the loss, whereas Marion (Kim Basinger), the mother, has become a shell of a human being. The husband and wife have separated for the summer, and occupy their East Hampton house on alternate days. Ted takes in Eddie (Jon Foster), a junior at Exeter and an aspiring writer, for a summer internship. Ted and Marion's daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), is indifferent to the loss, yet is obsessed with the ubiquitous pictures of the boys that cover the walls of the house. Eddie soon becomes sexually involved with Marion in a relationship that borders on incestuous, considering Eddie's resemblance to her son, Thomas.
The film opens on drawings from Ted's children's book, "The Door in the Floor." Its black watercolor scenes of beaches, houses, silhouettes of children and lurking demons provide a fine overture for the movie. The movie is at once playful and sordid, light and profound. The day-to-day events of ordinary life in the Cole's beach residence provide a veneer draping the emotional turmoil of Marion, and eventually Ted as well.
The Cole household and the community of East Hampton have a timeless quality. The film is set in the present day, but the feel of the movie is far from modern. Ted types his books on a typewriter, and the car that Eddie uses to ferry around Ted is a relic from a previous decade. Contemporary touches mingle uneasily with the rest of the movie. This is exemplified when Ted plays modern pop music in the car, and the lack of a sense of place is almost jarring.
Tod William's directing in "The Door in the Floor" is generally reserved but effective. Scenes that involve Marion are often coupled with flashbacks to a left turn signal that she watched from the backseat the night of the accident -- illustrating the thoughts that constantly plague Marion's mind.
Williams also makes great use of the sea -- filming it on various days, sunny at the beginning of the movie and enveloped in fog later on. The audience is reminded that the family resides in wealthy, exclusive East Hampton only in a few scenes, like those with Ruth's sassy teenage nanny. Otherwise, the movie could have been set in any American beach community.
Marion, possibly the most compelling character in the film, reminds the audience of a cool block of stone, with her deep blue eyes set in her sharp, angular face. She never really smiles at all. In one scene, after Eddie asks Marion about the car accident, her soul suddenly seems to evaporate from her body, leaving behind ghastly, gangly, human-shaped figure.
The Ted Cole character is supposed to be, as Irving mentioned, a "charming scoundrel." His routine, "Oh, I'm just an entertainer of children, and I like to draw," is a little irritating to the audience, but the people around Ted in the movie are charmed by it. Bridges plays Ted well, but, despite his domineering behavior and his penchant for walking around naked, he never really interests the audience too deeply. Ted does have plenty of memorable scenes and screen time, though.
In one scene, Eddie finds Ted drunkenly riding his bike at night, faraway in his own little world. This scene is the biggest clue into how the deaths of his sons deeply affected him.
Ted also engages in the bizarre pastime of degrading the amateur models who volunteer to work with him (why he works with naked models when he writes children's books is never explained). The movie is punctuated with visits to one model, Ms. Vaughn, who Ted humiliates over the course of several sessions. Irving mentioned during the question-and-answer session that this is one way in which Ted works through the loss of his sons.
Eddie, an introspective teenager, is a quiet presence for most of the movie. At first, he is a nervous kid who worships Ted. However, Eddie eventually sees Ted for what he truly is: sadistic and a bit of a hack. Eddie becomes a more powerful character through the course the movie. At first, he is an ineffectual pawn of Ted's, whose feelings and passions are irrelevant both to the Coles and to the story. Eddie's position does not change greatly by the end of the movie, although he eventually becomes more assertive and betrays his idol, Ted, in several ways at Marion's behest. The movie also charts Eddie's sexual awakening: early scenes of Eddie masturbating eventually give way to scenes of him growing more and more confident in the bedroom with Marion.
"The Door in the Floor" is a moving work, one part comedy, one part coming-of-age story and two parts study into human reaction to loss, and is certainly worth $10 to see when it is released in June.
