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The Door in the Floor (R) (111 min.) - The limitations of film compared with literature are apparent in Tod Williams' movie, based on only a portion of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year. There's still too much crammed into the movie, material usually at odds with itself: crushing tragedy vs. madcap humor, indelible characters vs. their incredible behaviors and protracted scenes vs. simpler, more effective points.
On the printed page, such details have room to breathe, making the transitions less abrupt, giving readers time to accept them. Moviegoers don't have that luxury. We can be trapped by storytellers with too much story to tell.
For those reasons, The Door in the Floor is an interesting mess. It contains yet another wonderful performance by Jeff Bridges, right, this time playing Ted Cole, an author whose enduring grief over the death of two sons leads to severely unsympathetic acts. Kim Basinger, left, is effective as his wife, Marion, whose depression initially makes her easy to care about. Then she begins an affair with young Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), whose close resemblance to a dead son turns our understanding of her loneliness into something like repulsion.
The marriage is practically over when the film begins. Ted announces his desire for separation as he hires Eddie to be his assistant. There are hints that Ted is setting up Marion for an affair with the prep school student. He counsels Eddie on how to manage an affair properly, and then aggressively rejects the idea. Ted has his own flings, primarily with Evelyn Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), whose nude posing for Ted's squid-ink sketches masks a pathetic personality we barely get to know. His growing dissatisfaction with Evelyn leads to third act shenanigans completely out of step with everything preceding it.
Anything admirable about Williams' movie is soon followed by something disrupting the mood. Sex is stripped of eroticism, replaced by manipulation. Sadness goes too far, mutating into selfishness. The themes are intriguing, but their execution, at least onscreen, doesn't do them justice. The Door in the Floor is never a bad movie, yet it constantly makes bad moves.
Bridges continues to astound us with the ease of his performances; few actors could keep Ted's wildly diverse reactions in such order. He does it by underplaying nearly everything until Williams' script takes away that choice. Basinger sacrifices beauty for depressed posturing, while holding on to that star ego requiring the sex to appear more flattering than the ugly circumstances warrant.
Foster proves himself to be a capable performer. The film's best work, however, is by Elle Fanning (younger sister of Dakota Fanning) as Ruth, the daughter the Coles have to compensate for the loss of their sons. Ruth never knew her brothers but "plays" with them through the photographs lining the walls. Ruth sees her careless father's nudity and her mother's infidelity but doesn't grasp what's happening, innocence that contrasts well with the adults' behavior.
A grownup Ruth is the central character of Irving's book; this movie covers the childhood problems affecting her later life. More of her perspective might have helped, but Williams keeps focusing on the adults. Perhaps another film covering the rest of the book would lend more meaning to this one. Grade: C-plus