In the bedroom was playing in Bravo. It’s a movie based on Andre Dubus short story “Killings.” It’s a really powerful movie about loss, grief and revenge. I always tell people that when I first saw it I wanted to leave, but that by the end of the movie it had become one of the best movies I had ever seen. It is the story of a family of 3, Frank, the only son becomes involve with a married woman with 2 kids, who is not yet fully divorced from her abusive ex-husband. After an altercation with the ex-husband, Frank dies. He was 21 years old. What happens next is the story of the parent’s grief at their son’s murder and the agony that they endure at their sudden loss. As they try to piece their lives back together and their marriage, they struggle with sleepless nights, and being haunted wit the memory of their dead son.
Perhaps even more than the amazing performances by the lead actors, we are transported into emotional habitat of anguish, silence and slow torture. The movie’s lack of dialogue perfectly shapes and represents the emotions that these people are feeling as they try to move on with their lives, each living a quiet hell of unending grief that is unsettled and turned into rage at the realization that the killer won’t have any jail time because of legal technicalities.
Most scenes are void of music; the dialogue and the environment do more than enough convey the emotions of the situation. Marisa Tomei gives the performance that blows away the one she was awarded the Oscar for, and Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek prove once again why they are the among the best in their craft and why they were nominated for an Oscar for their performance.
This movie is as consuming and as powerful as any ever made. The only negative audience’s give it is that it is slow, but it is that pace which allows the audience to grasp at the bleakness and desperation that the Fowler household is feeling. The pace represents that anguish, each second crawls by as the next approaches and every minute seems like an hour as Mr. and Mrs. Fowler try to cope with their loss. All of this culminates to an ending that is a product of the suffering and their realization that there is only one way in which they can continue with their lives.
This is one of the most beautiful and artistic movies that has come along in a long time. A story about loss, family, grief, morality and revenge, “In the bedroom” will end and not leave you. When I first watched it I almost walked out of the theater because of the slow pace, I didn’t understand the importance of pace and the silence, regardless its excellence cannot be denied. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow resumes the Fowler’s feelings well:
“There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
'A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.’”
and like this movie shows, so are the ones of death.
