52 Pick-Up #33 – In the Bedroom (2001)

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up in the middle of a Dog Days of Summer wrap-up before resuming the weekly rollout again in September.

Ah, end of summer. A magical time as the season starts to change, things start to cool and people are getting their last vacations and hurrahs in before fall starts and it's back to business.

And what has the shuffle chosen for this period in the season?

Oh.

Oh dear.

I mean, this is damn good, but tonally oh dear.

If there's one thing I have learned from this project for future use it's maybe seeing about trying to curate these pools a bit per time of year. Still try to keep them big enough for proper chance, but at least try and focus generally.

Okay, total disclosure – I will be doing a weighted month coming up, but there's no real points for guessing which month or in what way cause it'll be pretty obvious when it gets here.

ANYWAY, larger arc of the month aside, this is one of those that's been on my to do list for a long time. Like I said last time, I missed this at the time as I was, I will admit, not as good with keeping up with a lot of the awards circuit releases in the early aughts. From there, it occasionally flitted its way back up to the surface as a 'I should get to that' before fully locking itself back on there a few years back with the release of Tár and reviewing Todd Field's short, but impressive directorial list.

With that as a point of reference, and a loose idea of this movie's inciting incident, I went in actively trying to know as little as possible. With that in mind, it was hard not to get at least some expectations given the nature of the story.

I say this purely to add that I was pleasantly surprised when this movie actually eluded and/or exceeded my expectations on several levels. One of which is the main point I'll be going with for this.

But, before I get into that, let's start with the pitch.

In the Bedroom follows the Fowlers, a family in Maine consisting of Matt (Tom Wilkinson), Ruth (Sissy Spacek), and their adult son Frank (Nick Stahl.) Nick is back home for the summer following college and gearing up for grad school. This path, however, is left in doubt as Frank has fallen hard for for Natalie (Marisa Tomei), an older, divorced woman with two kids and a husband who isn't ready to let things go. The family is torn on how to feel on this as both Ruth and Matt discuss if this is just a phase or if they need to put their foot down. Unfortunately, as they discuss this, Natalie's ex begins becoming more violent, finally culminating in a confrontation with Frank that leaves the younger man dead.

This is all in roughly the first act of the movie, by the way, so don't worry about that as spoiler. It's the inciting incident more than anything and the bulk of the movie is more dedicated to the family processing everything that happened and how they choose to process and act on their grief.

Like I said above, I was very pleasantly surprised by this movie against what I was expecting. I had overall good expectations, but again, this actually went beyond what I was hoping for, in large part on the basis of the execution.

Between this and Tár, one thing I find myself appreciating in Field's work as a director is the sense of restraint in how things are presented. This is a story that deals with a number of emotionally heavy subjects, and especially given this was a film that became a major acting contender with the Oscars that year, it's hard not to expect the archetypal 'big' performances the Academy often goes for. Instead, this movie, and its leads, are built around a very emotionally restrained approach. 

Even before tragedy strikes, both Matt and Ruth are reluctant to be up front with Frank about their misgivings about his relationship and where they see it going. For Ruth, this leads to being very guarded and cut off, while Matt keeps being reluctantly indulgent in Frank, assuming this will all work itself out. When everything finally goes wrong, both are unclear how to approach one another over what happened. Even the moment when they finally come to a confrontation is not presented as a screaming match or a big blow out – in fact, there's even some acknowledgment that they can't seem to have the big blow out moment and that this is something of a frustration. That it's presented instead as two people who, even in grief and anger, feel they have to somehow hold back makes it feel even more powerful. What is two people pouring their hearts out about the pain they've internalized still has to be held back in how they express it just by their very natures.

The restraint also plays into the overall direction of the movie. Beyond the performances, the way the movie handles several of its major action beats is very controlled. Frank's two encounters with Natalie's ex-husband, for example, rely on what is unseen. The first of these we only see in the aftermath, care of the bruises Frank has from the confrontation. Their subsequent moment we only get in voices from another room, the emotional heft of the scene in Tomei's fear and then anguish as she hears it all play out.

These combined degrees of restraint are each effective on their own. Combined, they lead to a genuinely chilling payoff in the movie's final act. I won't go into too much detail on this here, tempted as I am. What I will say is there is no grand twist to come from this. There isn't any single revelation that completely upends the movie. There is some degree of uncertainty to which path it is going down, but it is not an ending that is made or broken by the reveal. But even with that said, it's still more effective if you don't know the way and just let the movie lead you their at its own slow, careful pace, steeping in the uncertainty of what is coming and how it gets there.

That uncertainty is also one of the feelings that resonates the most when the movie ends. Again, there is no big shock to be had here. When everything unfolds, it makes sense and feels reasonable as a course of events, but in the end, it doesn't feel neat or convenient. There's a lot that feels unresolved or unclear.

This is by design. This isn't a subject one can wrap up and put away. The audience, like Matt and Ruth, are going to be left to process just what happened after what should be a 'the end' moment. The story is over, but the feeling remains.

Hell, I feel like this is gonna be one of the first time watches from this that is gonna stick with me longer than most, and I am glad that it got drawn for this.

With that, the end of August is coming up fast and I've got one more on deck to go.

This will likely be a less haunting watch, but also connected as an Oscar nominee. I'll be jumping ahead a decade and change for 2019's Sound of Metal.

Till then.