LINKS
Based on John Irving's A Widow for One Year, The Door in the Floor comes closer to successfully translating the author's patented blend of over-the-top tragedy and quasi-grotesque comedy than any other Irving adaptation we've seen on the screen. Actually, director Tod Williams bases his film on just the first part of Irving's book, a smart decision that allows him to communicate the essence of the author's voice without becoming its little bitch. A few others have pulled off this trick, most notably Volker Schlondorff (whose big-screen version of Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum also tackled just the first part of a massive literary opus), but it's not nearly as easy as it seems.
"Dead means you're broken" are the very first words we hear in Williams' movie -- spoken by an angelic little girl trying to make sense of her siblings' deaths -- and, in fact, all of the characters in The Door in the Floor are either unfinished or broken. The little girl's mother and father are still coping with the deaths of their twin teenage sons, a tragedy that has turned the woman into a disconnected zombie and the man into a voracious, self-absorbed pleasure seeker. The little girl, who's too young to have even known her dead siblings, obsesses on the countless photographs of them that line the walls of the family home, and faithfully attaches stories to each image.
The Door in the Floor often seems like one more of those made-up-on-the-fly stories attached to a photograph on the wall. It immerses us in a sense of reality caught with its pants down -- spontaneous and even a little frivolous, but just as often raw, intense and almost painfully intimate, without even a clear beginning, middle or end.
The father and husband in the film's story is the squid ink artist, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a successful writer-illustrator of children's books who lives with his beautiful wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), in a comfortably ramshackle home in Long Island's fashionable Hamptons. Ted is one of those sensualists who give sensualists a bad name by opening themselves up to everything and ultimately letting nothing in. He ambles about the Hamptons in mismatched clothes or billowing dressing robes (or sometimes stark naked), seducing and then abandoning a string of wealthy, middle-aged women by mouthing the same silvery lines, getting them to pose for him, and then, when he's had his fill, turning ugly and abusive.
Marion simply sits and broods. She's unable to be the loving mother her young daughter so desperately needs and, in fact, she's unable to be or do much of anything. The Coles' marriage is clearly, seriously cracked, a yawning chasm that we observe from the film's first moments. Marion is disappearing into herself and away from her family, Ted is disappearing into the instant gratification of sex, booze and his own mini-celebrity, and into this fractured scenario walks Eddie (Jon Foster), a bright young man enlisted by Ted to serve as his assistant for the summer.
The kinky truth is that Eddie is a dead ringer for one of the Coles' dead sons -- something both parents are keenly aware of -- and when the boy begins displaying an obvious attraction to her, Marion does nothing to discourage it. Before you can say Summer of '42, the inexperienced younger man and the still-attractive older woman are going at it like bunnies in heat, and the old Irving Oedipal machinery is up and running at full power. There's plenty of sex on display -- including what's sure to be described as some "brave" nudity featuring middle-aged actresses Basinger and Mimi Rogers -- but most of the coupling comes off as awkward, animalistic and certainly ill-advised. Age dynamics aside, this is a long way from the sweet, glossy lovemaking of Summer of '42.
It's probably apparent that this isn't exactly your standard coming-of-age tale, and young Eddie doesn't necessarily glean much of value from his experience -- but that's just the way life is sometimes. Bad timing abounds, with characters constantly walking in on other characters at the worst possible moments, and director Williams frequently balances between inviting our nervous laughter and making us squirm in our seats. Bad behavior abounds too, with the film's lost and frayed souls coming off as likeable but not especially sympathetic (particularly Bridges' eccentric, larger-than-life charmer), at least not as measured by conventional morality. But life is like that, too.
It's not clear what we're supposed to make of all this, but that ambiguity is a large part of the reason the film manages to linger in our minds. The Door in the Floor doesn't necessarily make us feel good about what's happening on the screen or answer any burning questions about the lives of its characters, but its intentions are honorable. The movie wants to intrigue, not frustrate us, and if it occasionally miscalculates that equation, it's not for lack of trying. It might be best to approach the film as an emotional journey that doesn't appear to lead anywhere, a complex, haunting and sometimes jarring mixture of deep sadness, small pleasures and a disarmingly natural humor that creeps in when we least expect it.
There are a million stories in the naked city, and The Door in the Floor is certainly one of them. This is a film about nakedness -- naked emotions, naked bodies -- with a loose, open-ended quality that seems to extend the story well beyond the frame of the movie, its ending subject to change and, finally, beyond our grasp. Like one of those photographs on that little girl's wall, it's a film both fluid and hermetically sealed, inviting multiple interpretations and yet ultimately reluctant to give up its secrets -- and that, as they say, is both its blessing and its curse.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com.
