Customer Reviews

The Door in the Floor

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is my favorite contemporary novel, and it was clear when I read the book that it would never be made into a movie because the title character could never survive the transition. Indeed, all writer-director Mark Steven Johnson could do was be inspired to turn the first chapter of the novel into the film "Simon Birch." Irving himself did the screenplay for "The Cider Holes Rules" and had to condense and restructure the story to come up with a movie version. Even "The World According to Garp," which captures the high points of the comic novel, leaves out so much of the depth and detail. Of course, this is true of any adaptation of a novel. Things are always added and subtracted, changed and replaced, with any novel, but it seems that with Irving's novels filmmakers are painfully aware of the difficulties.

Such was the case with "A Widow for One Year," and writer-director Tod Williams gives himself a fighting chance by restricting himself to the first third of the novel in "The Door in the Floor." In doing so he at least creates a new market for the novel, since there is most of the story of these four people to be told. The situation is that Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), who writes and illustrates stories for children, decides to hire an assistant for the summer, and hires a 16-year-old Exeter student, Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), who wants to be a writer when he grows up. The Cole family consists of wife Marion (Kim Basinger), their four-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), and the dozens of photographs on the wall of Tom and Tim, the two sons who died when they were teenagers.

Eddie does not know that he has walked into on going tragedy until it is way too late. Marion takes Eddie to bed, not just because Ted no longer touches her and the boy becoming a man has a crush on her, but because Ted wants to build a swimming pool. Ted and Marion have decided that the pain they feel needs to be inflicted on the other, but the tacit agreement is that they will not do it directly. If you pay attention, there are only a few scenes in which Marion and Ted appear together: Eddie becomes their go between, even when there are not any explicit messages. Eddie is the final nail in the coffin of this marriage, although only one of the three realizes this first and uses it to their advantage.

Although hired to help Ted, who needs to be driven around because he has lost his license, Eddie realizes he is there more for Marion and Ruth. For the little girl the most important thing in the world are the pictures of Tom and Tim on the walls. Each one has a story, and pity the poor nanny who does not know the story behind a particular photography. Ruth knows the stories by heart, but she likes to hear them being told to her again (and again). Ted thinks that Marion's indiscretions mean he can win guardianship of Ruth when the inevitable divorce happens, but never realizes he is playing the wrong game here.

When you see Basinger and Foster together their sexual relationship seems too hard to accept, but this would not be a problem if Williams did not choose to show us some of their more intimate moments. This is a mistake, not just because you are suddenly doing the math on the age difference between the actress and actor, but more importantly because the importance of the relationship is best seen from Ted's perspective. He never sees it (although Ruth does), but he knows about it and is bent on using that fact to his advantage. Both Basinger and Bridges bring an economy to their characters that brings a sharpness to their pain; for her it is the dead look in her eyes, for him it is the sound of what is missing in his voice.

"The Door in the Floor" is more forgiving of both Ted and Marion than the novel is by the end of that first section. Ted does not simply have affairs, but engages in calculated seductions using his talent and reputation. His current conquest, Evelyn Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), is in the final stages of the sordid relationship, where degradation becomes the name of the game. But Williams uses the sequence where Evelyn tries to take her revenge as the most comic moment in the film, and reduces his despicable treatment of the woman to a joke on a windshield. The film's sympathies are clearly with Marion, who is reduced to catatonia by thoughts of her dead sons. When she comes to her decision as to what is to be done, we believe it is the right one, even though the consequences are going to be devastating. But then Williams mutes the impact considerably.

As someone who read "A Widow for One Year," watching "The Door in the Floor" certainly hit the high points and brought back vivid memories of the best parts of the novel. But I now the movie will not resonate the same way for those who have not read the novel, but seeing this 2004 drama should certainly inspire them to do so. What happens in this film wrecks these four lives in persistent and insidious ways. This film is only the beginning of their story.

The Door in the Floor is a fantastic film; an engaging, engrossing, and touching change of pace from the utter garbage that has been released this summer. This is a true adult film if there ever was one, full of wonderful, complicated, and real characters going through true everyday emotions that anyone can relate to.

Alternately tragic and comic, the film is an exploration of the complexities of love in both its brightest and darkest moments. Adapted from the first half of John Irving's best-selling novel 'A Widow for One Year,' the film is set in the privileged beach community of East Hampton, New York and chronicles one pivotal summer in the lives of famous children's book author Ted Cole (an Oscar-worthy performance by Jeff Bridges) and his beautiful wife Marion (Kim Basinger reminding us once again why she IS an Oscar-nominated actress). The couple's once-wonderful marriage has been strained by a family tragedy and neither one is or will ever be the same again.

Marion's resulting depression and Ted's subsequent infidelities have prevented the couple from facing a much-needed change in their relationship. They aren't divorced but they don't like together anymore either, taking turns staying in the house to care for their daughter (played by the adorable Elle Fanning, Dakota's sister). Then, Ted hires Eddie O'Hare, a 16 year old who wants to be a writer, to work as his summer assistant, changing the couple's lives forever. The boy becomes the couple's unwitting yet willing pawn - and, ultimately, becomes the catalyst in the transformation of their lives.

The Door in the Floor is a film of deep, devastating power - a film where you, as an audience member, actually share space with its two main characters. We inhabit their crumbled world, from the inside, not just as observers. By the end, we feel as if we have gone through their tragedy with them, and when I left the theatre, I felt as if my life had been changed by sharing with them what I just shared - as if time itself had stopped and left me suspended in there, with them.

The entire cast is very convincing and the film sparkles with dynamic performances. At first I felt Mimi Rogers was wasted in her almost silent role, but she has one of the most memorable scenes in the film, which came toward the end, and truly delivers a wonderful comedic portrayal. Elle Fanning amazed me. She is a gifted young talent and I look forward to seeing more of her. Like her sister Dakota, she did everything right. Jon Foster as Eddie is terrific, bringing out his character's innocence and confusion, and Bijou Phillips was great in her very small role.

The film is very explicit, but for anyone with an open mind and an open heart, it is THE film to see this summer. Hands down, one of the year's best. It definitely deserves and needs a wide release.


Grade: A

THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR is a reimagining of part of John Irving's book, A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR. Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a monumentally self-absorbed children's book author, hires a teen age boy named Eddie (Jon Foster) as an assistant for a summer on Long Island. Quite a bit of the book is a coming-of-age story of Eddie's affair with Ted's wife Marion (the excellent Kim Basinger), who is racked with grief over the death of the couple's twin boys. The young daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning) was conceived to "replace" the boys, but Marion cannot emotionally attach to her daughter.

Jeff Bridges, in a monumental performance, takes center stage in the film. Ted orchestrates the summer in order to try to assuage Marion's grief while indulging his appetites in an affair with Mrs Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), a lonely neighbor. Things don't go as planned, and while it while i could describe the turns of the plot at length, suffice it to say that this is a film for adults, about love, loss, parenthood, the male ego, and so much more. Bridges and Basinger both do Oscar caliber work and the final image is indelibly haunting. One of the year's best.....

Also with Bijou Phillips and Donna Murphy....

I was very moved by this movie, dispite the fact that it had not tried to be depressing, and it was the right tone of sadness without overwhelming me. Just as Kim Basinger's would go:" Eddie, you are so serious for your age." She said that because she's numb and overly tramatized by the death of her teenage sons. This is about letting go of what has been taken away or lost and close that door forever.
Both Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges sort of gave the tramatic event a silent treatment and it had build a wall between them. It's unavoidable that an ignorant youngster like Jon Foster would provoke those old feelings when he asked Basinger about the deceased boys. She instantly turned to stone just like the day they died in the accident. Even Jeff Bridges had been avoiding "the door in the floor" for years. They just haven't dealt with it and memories will always come back and haunt them.
Jeff Bridges is great, and he deserves extra credit for doing several scenes fully naked. His character's state of mind is the opposite of Basinger. He uses casual sex as a form of pleasure to escape from his depressing life. He feels obligated to stay with his wife when they no longer have any passion towards each other. Although he had constantly avoided opening the door to the floor, he ultimately does so, because he had to accept what he can't changed.
Kim Basinger finally landed a great part again since her stunning role in L.A. Confidential. I enjoyed her a great deal in this film, because she had gone from so sad to letting herself go and sexually connects herself with Jon Foster. It was so mesmerizing to see her breaking down into tears when she was making love with Foster. Without a single line to deliver, her face expressed all her pain and sadness. She thought it was a mistake to have a baby(Elle Fanning) again after the teenage boys died. It didn't help them save the marriage, and she had stayed too long, even when she had lost all her feelings. She ultimately abandoned everyone including her daughther, because she didn't want to be a bad mother. I trully hope she will get her best actress award with this performance. Her final scene in the movie when she touches the face of Bridges before driving away was also a memorable part of this film. The two lead had almost no dialogues together. This shows how distant they have became, and they were no longer happy together.

The Door In the Floor reminds us that children's stories are really pretty frightening. (Have you read the brothers Grimm recently?) Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) writes such stories, among them one called The Door In the Floor, in which very bad things live beneath the titular door. Ted and his estranged wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), also live in a very bad place: a world bereft of their two sons, Thomas and Timothy, now dead for some years. How they cope, or fail to cope, with their loss is the subject of the film.

As Ted, Bridges gives as masterful a performance as I've seen in some years. He manages to make a manipulative philanderer into a sympathetic character. Without his magic, the tragedy of Ted's situation would be impossible to believe. If this isn't an award-worthy performance, I haven't seen one: its breadth is amazing, and it is apparantly effortless. Basinger invests Marion with a benumbed grief that is painful to witness. This performance makes her Oscar winning turn in LA Confidential seem almost facile by comparison. As Eddie O'Hare, the young pawn whom Ted brings into the game against his wife, Jon Foster is the weakest link in the trio. He has the requisite innocence, but not the much-needed sensitivity. He is simply too wooden. Elle Fanning is wonderful as the child the Coles had, hoping to replace their dead boys; Mimi Rogers is dead-on as one of Ted's conquests--one who turns on him in a welcome bit of comic relief.

If you are sensitive to such things, the movie deserves its R rating. There is male nudity, from the rear, and full frontal female nudity. The language is about what one would expect from an R rated movie.

The Door In the Floor is truly memorable for for two big reasons. 1)Jeff Bridges is spectacularly fine, without appearing to be spectacular at all. 2)When you reach the very last scene, you will realize the full import of Ted Cole's world-view, and you'll see the treatment of his character in the movie in a completely new light. This kind of ironic legerdemain, transforming the meaning of the entire film, lifts the whole thing onto a higher level.

"I am just an entertainer of children, and I like to draw." We hear this statement three or four times throughout the film The Door in the Floor. But the character of Ted Cole is someone much more.

We open to an out-of-focus shot where Ruth (Elle Fanning), the little girl of the Cole family, carries a chair through the hallway to look at the typical wall of photographs. It is filmed carefully in a very wide shot. She performs this scene in a graceful manner so that we are introduced to the masterful subtlety of the first act of this film--how it is more of a nuance and less of a forceful film. That is just one example of many of the particularly inspired scenes scattered throughout this well-crafted, scrupulously assembled film. The Door in the Floor is a painting made with moving images, and it is a very touching--yet slightly flawed--piece of art all at once. Not one performance is really forced, though. And that's its strong point.

It's a film like someone is trying not to make a film (okay that was corny, but if you've seen the film, you know what I mean). The screenwriter wishes to tell a story stripped of the prescribed pretenses that so many mainstream movies feature these days.

Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger are well cast as the stereotypically failing couple of Ted and Marion Cole. They are the parents of Ruth, and continue to grieve the loss of their two deceased sons. Marion is more disturbed by the accident than her husband, who plays it off to retain his sanity. They're basically bored with one another and need a change--trial separation comes to mind. The Coles have two houses, and each spouse switches to have time with their only daughter, who is around four or fives year old, and avoid each other at the same time. They're trying to be good parents, and yet at the same time, they lack the effort and motivation to inhabit the parent role. Two very self-centered, yet realistic, characters in a way.

But in comes Eddie (Jon Foster of life as we know it), who will literally turn the Cole family upside down. Ted hires him as an assistant, but he's more than that--he is the catalyst of their breakdown. He resembles one of the dead sons, and he hopes that he can give one of the boys back to Marion. Ted truly does this for his own selfish reasons so that she will divorce him and he can continue to sleep with every woman on the island for the rest of his life.

The Coles are creatures of habit. They seldom stray outside the restrictions of their daily routine--Ted writes, paints nudes of Mrs. Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), and plays squash while Marion mopes in self-pity and goes to the beach and the cinema on occasion. Each character is well-fleshed out in that way so that by the end, we can perhaps understand each of their actions and sympathize with them while hating them all at once. How can you not hate these people?! Eddie is completely infatuated with Marion, and at one point, she catches him masturbating to her clothes (arranged in an almost comic fashion). That scene is particularly awkward, and we as the audience feel what Eddie is feeling, and how Marion must be reacting to this. This scene is great, although there still exist some especially sporadic ones.

Eddie and Marion embark on an intense affair, making love some 60 times over the course of the summer in basically every position that you can imagine (the "inadequate lampshade" scene is very funny and disturbing all at once). The sex scenes are awkward, creepy, but well done. We get to see in The Door in the Floor what we never saw in The Graduate--although I doubt that is what writer/director Tod Williams was attempting to do. This affair sparks a chain reaction of strange occurences, catastrophic events, and confrontations within the walls of the Coles house, and some of them are quite brilliant. Although it's a linear story, its characters and their emotions are often nonlinear, which is perhaps closest to human emotion in some sense. The Eddie character, although I admired Foster's performance from a distance, is still kind of inconsistent throughout the borders. In the final act of the film, which stretches to fascinating and disturbing heights, he takes on the persona that I wanted to see him in the first two acts.

Jeff Bridges gives his best work to date in this film. There are no screaming, thrashing arguments, no drama-staple scenes where Ted overreaches and you can see the look in his eyes "please give me an Oscar damnit!" He simply delivers the dialogue in a masterful, understated, and bittersweet way that only a great American actor can do. I'm with him for the win, all the way.

Kim Basinger is almost in top form, although there are too little scenes that feature her doing any kind of performing (besides performing on Eddie) that would merit nomination worthy material. The film's main problem is that it cannot seem to equally balance what a dark comedy needs to have. I think that the film should have been left more as a drama (although its often sardonically funny) and less of a dark comedy. There are little comedic moments arranged throughout The Door (you're just waiting for Bridges to say something along the lines of "obviously you're not a golfer" or "I'm the dude!"), but by the time we reach the moment where the film's course is set to parody and back again, we do not know how to react. The chase scene feels tacked on, and it comes as too much of a surprise and less of the paradox it was meant to be. And Mrs. Vaughn, where Mimi Rogers bears all, is just too underdeveloped to make it really work.

The scene where the "accident" is described in detail by Ted Cole is unsettling and chilling, as are many moments throughout the film. The performances are, in general, fantastic. Terry Stacey's cinematography is gentle and is the best I've seen all year. Not only does it use a beautiful color palette, but it lets things play out, and focues a lot on the character's surroundings. Their reactions are clear. Everything is very open, especially the moments where the hills are shot exquisitely through the shrouding mist. Marcelo Zarvos has composed an amazingly moving, tear inducing score. There are all these wonderful things working to churn the gears of this movie, and they don't stop. It is mostly the inevitable sinkholes of the tone and story that bring this movie down from its true potential. I still liked it. In fact, I still really liked it. And I love the book, and Tod Williams' film remains quite faithful to the first third of John Irving's best novel A Widow for One Year. I just wish that Ruth, as well depicted by Elle Fanning as she was, was elaborated on a bit more. She was the focus of the original source material. That's all that will come out of the mouth of this book fan.

For the most part, this is a very good film that you should not miss. It deserves any acting nominations for its performances. Go ahead and open The Door in the Floor. You'll be surprised.

Becoming a parent can be the single most transitional time for a mother. This is the time she realizes the earth exists because of procreation. In her children, she sees the potential fulfillment of her every hope, her every dream. No matter how disappointed or confused she is about motherhood, she knows one thing: She would die for her children. She loves them endlessly. She knows these are not just words.

Marion (Kim Basinger) is scary because she is so real. Ask a roomful of mothers what they would do if their children died, and you might be suprised at how many say that would be the end of their life too.

(Spoiler warning!) Marion is the mother who killed herself when her children died -- even though she did not physically take her own life. She killed herself through deadening her heart.

She feels echoes of her husband's love, but he has (spoiler warning!) grabbed more firmly upon the bottle and other women to keep himself afloat and alive after the death of his sons. These distractions keep his life -- deceptively -- vibrant. Shallow, cold, distant, but (to cop the title of an old movie) "an Imitation of Life." He believes himself alive, but part of him has died, too.

Slowly, the realization of Ted's lifestyle filters through Marion's fog of dispair, giving her the strengh to leave -- completely.

This movie vividly expresses the sexual relationship between Marion and a young male assistant (to her husband) who represents both of the deeply powerful aspects of her sons -- popularity and shy wisdom.

While the character may seem perverse, I belive that Marion knew that this boy was not a flesh and blood son of hers, but rather a symbol. A Son. And she did not want the possibility of death to skew his chances of having the one thing that every teen boy values above all.

I can see where a viewer could become disgusted or confused, but I think the movie is rendered delicately enough to communicate its real message. A mother's mourning never ceases. Not through any life change, not through hope, not through anything.

Fortunately, there is enough sensitively-rendered comedy to help lift the darker moods of this movie.

Marion -- in the end -- was the central character. No other character was as important. I think it was clear in the sparse way she decorated her house, the sparse way she existed (without any care of pools or lawns or sociializing), that she had taken the role of the living dead.

Redeemingly, Kim Basinger added an element to Marion that made me think she loved her living daughter Ruth despite the fact that she (Marion) felt she had no love left in herself. (Spoiler warning!) Even when she left Ruth, you felt she loved Ruth, but that she could never acknowledge that love.

A painful, mysterious, all too real, then completely unreal movie. Five stars!

The Door in the Floor is a film adaptation of part of John Irving's novel A Widow For One Year. It relates one summer in the lives of Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a writer of children's books; his wife Marion (Kim Basinger) and their four-year-old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning); and Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a prep school student and would-be writer who comes to intern with Ted. Marion and Ted are a long-married couple whose relationship foundered when their teenage boys were killed in a car accident. It also doesn't help that Ted is an aggressive philanderer who specializes in going after mother/daughter pairs. By the time Eddie arrives, at the start of the film, Ted and Marion are gingerly working out a trial separation.

Though much of the film's action is seen through Eddie's eyes, it is clear from the outset that The Door in the Floor is Jeff Bridges' movie. His embodiment of Ted is unerringly right, through all the character's shifts from breeziness to pompous false modesty to querulousness and bluster. Studiedly scruffy and yet charming, he is solicitous to Marion, raffish with numerous female admirers, and a devoted (if unconventional) father. His range is so effortless as to seem completely artless.

The other performers pale by comparison - partly, one suspects, because the script gives them less fleshed-out characters to play. The film's most tragic character, Marion is a lost soul since the death of her sons, wandering through life with melancholy inattention. Eddie's appearance revives her slightly, but at the film's end, though she rouses herself to act, one suspects that the act will bring her no solace. It seems like Kim Basinger could give even the wooden Mrs. Cole a little more winsomeness. But that's a quibble; she fulfills the demands of the script well enough.

Jon Foster's monochromatic earnestness as Eddie is a bigger problem for the film. When he arrives at the Coles' place, Eddie finds that life as Ted's intern is hardly educational - at least, in any of the ways he would expect. His primary occupations involve re-typing miniscule corrections in Ted's stories, entertaining Ruth, and chauffering Ted to his various social commitments and liaisons. (Ted has lost his driver's license to a DUI conviction.) Of course, since this is partly Eddie's coming-of-age saga, he also embarks on a summer-long affair with Marion, leading to lots of interesting complications with Ted, as well as one hilarious episode involving Ruth. In all of this, it seems there would be plenty of grist for humor, mortification, and mischief in Foster's portrayal of the young intern. Unfortunately, he gets no further than his initial earnestness, unless you count a late foray into peevishness. By the end of the film, Eddie is just as much a cipher as he was when he arrived.

Outside of Bridges', the most pungent portrayals in the movie come from minor characters: Mimi Rogers, wonderfully volatile as one of Ted's conquests; and Louis Arcella as her longsuffering gardener.

In the end, The Door in the Floor is a good movie, worth the entry fee and an evening's time. Director Tod Williams imbues his tale with sufficient emotional depth, humor, and human familiarity to make us care about these people and their misadventures. But with a little stronger script, and performances from the other principles to match Mr. Bridges', it could have been very special indeed.

A word about the title, by the way. The film takes its name from one of Ted's children's books, and it is an image that takes on more and more resonance as the story proceeds. It is only in the last moments of the movie, though, that "the door in the floor" takes on its final, unexpected and rather wonderful meaning. Look for it.

The Door in the Floor is a disturbing film. It is a film that examines manipulation, tragedy, marriage, and death. What I found more disturbing are scenes of actor children with actor adult nakedness, a storyline of numerous teen masturbation attempts, and the inevitable older woman/teenage boy sexual relations, with a smearing of "art is the nude" in an smarmy, semi-comedic John Irving setting. Based on John Irving's novel, "A Widow for One Year," the story centers on the hedonistic children's book author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), his wife, Marion (Kim Bassinger), their four year old daughter, Ruthie (Ellie Fanning), and Eddie (Jon Forester), an Exeter high school student living with the couple as a writer's assistant/chauffeur to Ted. Depicted only in photographs are the dead sons of Ted and Marion, Timothy (age 15) and Thomas (age 17), whose photographs fixate Ruthie, and remain the only evidence of a once happy period in the lives of the parents.

The Cole's marriage has disintegrated into a series of eccentricities acted out by Ted a buffoonish celebrity- artist who romps naked across his Long Island estate, is the village debaucher of bored rich housewives with big breasts (Mimi Rogers), and the calculating seducer of mothers and daughters to pose for him. Marion is a cold basket case. A woman so withdrawn she shares an in-town apartment/family home arrangement with Ted and avoids Ruthie, a penance that brings forth the reality of maternal responsibility, a response she judiciously avoids. The thought of her sons and the accident which the family experienced killed more than just their sons as Marion becomes catatonic at the recollection. In this dysfunctional setting Eddie, a young, sexually inquisitive boy is introduced. Marion seduces him and narrates her side of the marriage to Eddie. She also realize the extent she has failed as mother, lover, and wife. Marion is "difficult" according to Ted, she is too high maintenance for both Eddie and Ted combined and abandons the home and family as well as her daughter, Ruthie, a point Ted can not fathom.

Manipulation of children seem to be the way Ted and Marion communicate: Ted "gives" Eddie to Marion because he resembles her dead son, Marion uses Ruthie's neurotic behavior to alienate Ted and underscore his inability to nurture her as a father, and both Ted and Marion use the memory of Timothy and Thomas to destroy everyone in their wake. This is the privilege lifestyle of the Long Island set and it reinforces the role of flanneur which Eddie maintains throughout the film. He is never an insider nor has the morals nor ability to develop them unlike Ruthie whose behavior is already warped and fragile. In a study of classism, privilege, and the disintegration of the family, The Door in the Floor is subtle storytelling unlike the typical American film.

Performances by Bridges and Bassinger have the right amount of stop and go, outrageousness and contained rage. Bridges informs young Eddie of his story in the narrative third person, a detachment to his role in the deaths of his sons. As young actors Fanning and the actor who plays Eddie are their victims in another death of the soul, which Eddie fights to salvage. And, while it is a beautiful setting at the surface, the undercurrent of warped values demonstrated by the wealthy Long Island community is not to be admired. With the emphasis on sexuality on display from both adult characters through Bridges and Bassinger, the carnal scenes between adult and children is at times off-putting and far from the pastoral "Summer of '42" initiation of youth to adulthood rite of passage. Eddie's initiation is a mental seduction as well as physical molestation by Ted and Marion.

All in all, The Door in the Floor requires numerous viewings to grasp the many threads and nuances which make it one of the better movies for thought provoking consideration.

Chance and circumstance. Intertwining myth, tragedy of heroic proportion, the fragility of illusion and appearances, this film gracefully exposes viewers to the depths of our bondage to our self-imposed archetypes. Dissolute Writer, The Lustful Boy, The Wounded Mother, The Spurned Lover. The walking wounded stumble and fall together in this luminous, beautifully crafted showcase for the acting skills of a stellar cast.

I found the most telling scene to be the one in which Eddie, looking up into the face of his lover Marion, sees her face contorted not with the passion of lust but the passion of grief. Marion's estranged husband Ted later points out to Eddie that he had "given" Eddie to her because of his resemblance to one of her dead sons. Marion herself had revealed the incestuous/cathartic nature of her desire for Eddie when she almost longingly confides in him her certainty/sorrow that this son had died a virgin, then almost in the same breath invites Eddie to lose his virginity to her. This act consummates her awareness that she must leave behind her enamored lover, her philandering husband, and her small daughter - that it's "better to be dead" than to be a poor mother.

There was plenty of room for this film to dissolve into cliche'd resolution of conflicts, but instead the story reveals the depth and intelligence and truthfulness of these character's flaws as if peeling away layers of silken veils. The deft and deep acting skills of the cast are marvelous to behold - it was breathtaking to watch the naturalness of Jeff Bridges as he arises from his bed and walks his tiny daughter back to hers, then stands in the doorway to toss her a few honest thoughts on fear, all the while content in his nudity. I found myself longing to be that uninhibited. It was an honor to see the aging actors reveal their characters, line by facial line, to watch the younger actors' romantic, brave, naivte', and yes, thank God for Mimi Rogers showing the desirability, vulnerability, and passion of a mature, healthy woman.

There were no "perfect" characters, no fluffy endings, nothing Hollywood about this film. It did not cheat. I highly recommend it to anyone capable of appreciating their own imperfections, the horrors of surviving your own chidren, and the struggle to understand and accept our human limitations.