In the Bedroom (2001)
Directed by Todd Field
Summertime on the coast of Maine, "In the Bedroom" centers on the inner dynamics of a family in transition. Matt Fowler is a doctor practicing in his native Maine and is married to New York born Ruth Fowler, a music teacher. His son is involved in a love affair with a local single mother. As the beauty of Maine's brief and fleeting summer comes to an end, these characters find themselves in the midst of unimaginable tragedy.
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What critics compared In the Bedroom to
And it achieves its art-house bona fides by borrowing from the vengeful-parent motif of the 2001 In the Bedroom.
He fares impressively in the film, which is reminiscent of “Mystic River,” “In the Bedroom” and the crime dramas of David Fincher.
Fully deserving of mention in the same breath as “Seven,” “Mystic River” and “In the Bedroom,” this Sept. 20 Warners release may prove too intense for some viewers, but should ride strong reviews and word of mouth to above-average R-rated returns.
In “In the Bedroom,” a much superior film about a decent, law-abiding man who takes revenge on his son’s killer, the horror was in seeing how a good man could be twisted into a savagery beyond his own comprehension.
Field, whose best-known acting includes roles in Ruby in Paradise and Eyes Wide Shut, gets outstanding performances all around.
BY KIM LINEKIN When Sissy Spacek started reading the script for In the Bedroom by actor-turned-director Todd Field (Eyes Wide Shut, Once and Again), she thought, "This is a nice love story.
The director is Todd Field, a young character actor best-remembered as Tom Cruise's piano-playing friend in Eyes Wide Shut.
Todd Field, an actor ("Eyes Wide Shut") who makes his feature directing debut in the wonderful "In the Bedroom," not only understands that landscape but has a remarkable grasp of how to make it live onscreen.
He was in Eyes Wide Shut and is a regular on the TV show Once and Again.
The film was written and directed by Todd Field, making his feature debut after working as an actor in everything from French Canadian TV miniseries "Lance et Compte" to Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut".
With all the makings of a great drama, "Unfaithful" borrows the best elements from "In the Bedroom" and ends up using them to their worst.
In the way it shows how complacency and convention can make bad things happen to decent people, this movie might tempt comparisons to In the Bedroom.
Without giving away too much of the plot, the character-driven first half of the film (much of it dedicated to the wonderful scenes of Lane and Gere tiptoeing around the truth), gives way to a plot-driven second half that resembles the overwrought histrionics of In the Bedroom.
I could have had about six extramarital affairs in the time it took to watch Unfaithful, a film that (d)evolves with Darwinian slowness from an air of bland diversion into some truly unsettling sexual politics, and tumbles from that already low plateau into an ersatz In the Bedroom , in which an emotionally distant husband and wife attempt to salve their suffering marriage with the odd balm of felony brutality.
It starts to feel like a discarded early draft for "In the Bedroom."
The various and venerable spirits of “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Ordinary People” and “In the Bedroom” may hover over this movie in wintry setting and theme, but “Manchester by the Sea” is very much its own singular, seething creation.
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Field, whose last film was "In the Bedroom," co-wrote the movie with Perrotta, with whom he obviously shares an interest in hermetic environments and a fascination with what happens when their familiar dynamics are disturbed by outside or deviant forces.
The followup from writer/director Todd Field to his 2001 In the Bedroom , this is something of a mirror image to that film: where his earlier work was an exquisite portrait of marital intimacy, this one is about, in part, where marriage falls apart, about the lack of that intimacy.
Pedigree: It's from Tom Perrotta, the writer of Election, and writer-director Todd Field (In the Bedroom).
Writer/director Todd Field follows up his Academy Award nominated 2001 film In the Bedroom with a much more accessible entry.
In this one from Todd (In the Bedroom) Field, ominous narration and rich cinematography layer suburban parents Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, and Jennifer Connelly in an artisanal-cheesy casserole of adultery and literary pretension.
That quality no doubt appealed to filmmaker Todd Field, whose Oscar-nominated 2001 drama In the Bedroom explored similar territory.
But that night, Rhoda was driving drunk and hit a family car head on, killing John Burroughs's (William Mapother, "In the Bedroom," TV's 'Lost') wife and son while she gazing up at the sky and "Another Earth."
Turns out Mary actually has a major crush on the good Dr. Mierzwiak, played ever so smoothly by the always good Wilkinson ( In the Bedroom ).
I'm not ready to swear off revenge movies yet, but I find myself longing for another with the mule-kick of a Man on Fire but the double-edged, even tragic perspective of The Searchers (1956) or Taxi Driver (1976) or The Limey (1999) or In the Bedroom (2001).
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Imagine a particularly relentless haunted-house shocker invested with the emotional and psychological torment of something like In The Bedroom , and you’ll get a sense of the movie’s dark alchemy.
Then there was “In the Bedroom,” which may be the most sophisticated revenge thriller ever staged; it was like a Bronson movie made by Merchant-Ivory.