Good performances, great unfold of the plot, shots and cutting all
their own and effective. Only toward the end did I start to feel the
contrivance. The first I felt it was in one particular shot, a
medium shot with the belligerent friend and his megaphone at night in
the front yard with the addled mother of the pariah alleged sex
offender right as she collapses–it started to seem a bit
unintendedly silly there. Also the way expectations were played
with, in the thriller genre at the climax, seemed unworthy of the
film, although perhaps hardwired into the book. Perhaps my distaste
for it has to do a certain allegiance I feel to misfits and their
validation, where the whole point of this film from the title on down
was revealed at the end to really characterize the affair as an
illusory feat of immaturity. Then it was that I saw that the film
really does take this stance toward its characters, a sort of moral
high ground that only gives lip service to an actuality. And then
there are the huge lacunae that exist to make that case. For
instance the absolute irredeemability of Kate Winslet’s idiot husband
and his panty-sniffing internet obsession is just a pastiche, and yet
it’s this that somehow constrains her to this “kept” unhappiness
likened to Madame Bovary’s? In the book club scene Winslet argues
heroically (against the pastiche of a suburban automaton) for the
validity of Madame Bovary’s hunger for life, yet the film ultimately
doesn’t embrace this position wholeheartedly. Its idea of maturity
seems to be to resign oneself to mistakes made in marriage rather
than confront or transcend them. What, after all, of promise is
there to be found in the huge gap between the failed lawyer’s living
in the past and his narcissistic wife and her distrusting eclipsing
mother. Are we to imagine some kind of reconciliation? The more I
think about it, the more this film is a simulacrum of the message it
purports, briefly, to believe in. It signals things constantly about
the characters, such as Jennifer Connolly gazing adoringly into the
narcissist’s mirror of their sleeping child, calling him “perfect”
over and over again. The framed professional bedside portrait we see
later of she and her husband, with her nearly blocking him out and
absorbing twice the light while he peers at camera over her
shoulder. These things are all signalled so that, as Roberta once
observed, we get them intellectually, but do we really feel them?
Has what’s being put over in the film really got into the ring and
engaged us on that level, in the raw way that say a Cassavetes film
would? This film would not dare to stick its neck out, to be made a
fool of, to leave conclusions dangling. In a film like “In the
Bedroom” there was something much tighter going on with the story
that made it almost archetypal or mythic, and ironically the actors
within that (also owing to the tragic tone) could find something that
was less in danger of this kind of falsety. Here, while I really do
admire the film, I find the predisposition of it ultimately a little
confining. It came so close to the real, yet its shortfall was that
much more evident. I heard an interview with Todd Field by Elvis
Mitchell on “The Treament” (KCRW) and a remark by Field that struck
me was his view of characters as defined by the many different
situations they find themselves in and other characters they play
opposite. As in life, we are strikingly different people in
different situations. I saw this at work in the film, and it was
delightful to see. Yet, like a stereopticon, which gives you an
illusion of 3D, it differs here from the fullest reality which I
think is achievable even within a story, by being a series of flat
planes arranged in three dimensions, with all the control and insight
required to achieve that, but lacking, ultimately, the courage to
punch those planes out into the true 3 dimensions that they occupy.
I think maybe that the courage to take that on was a little more
childish, possibly ruinously foolish, than the filmmaker or the
writer would allow themselves without violating the theme of this work.