The Door in the Floor
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Movie Reviews of The Door in the Floor
Movie Review: The Door In The Floor
Summary: 5 Stars
You already know the story line so I don't need to repeat it. All I can say is that Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, and the rest of the cast was great. I love the book and even though some of the elements were missing from the movie, it was still great. Elle Fanning, sister of Dakota Fanning (I Am Sam, Uptown Girls) was great as her character. Definitly worth seeing.Movie Review: great john irving adaptation
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is one forth of the book A Widow for One Year by John Irving. It is a great story and Kim Bassinger is at her best and most beautiful in this film. Jeff Bridges also does a fine job. the cast is superb and it is a great story.
Watch It.
Movie Review: A Door Into a Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is not only beautifully acted, it is a peek into the unusual novel, A Widow for One Year. It absolutely captures the visual sense, the emotional tenor and the bizarly acceptable first 200 pages of the book. They go together beautifully.Movie Review: We see in the 'Floor' what we never saw in 'The Graduate'
Summary: 4 Stars
"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.
Movie Review: The first third of John Irving's "A Widow for One Year"
Summary: 4 Stars
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.