In the Bedroom
dir. Todd Field
Miramax Pictures

"What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" — Henry James

For storytellers, those are words to live by, blasting away the misapprehension that you can have good characters but a vacant plot, or a well plotted story with blank characters. The plot only exists to present dramatis personae with choices; character is what can be known about those people from the choices that they make.

In the Bedroom, directed by Todd Field from a script by Field and Robert Festinger, is about the ramifications of a son's murder on his parents' life and marriage. Here are some events and dialogue excerpts from the film:

• At the moment at which the son is called away to the scene at which he'll die, he's talking to the admissions counselor of a college, soundly resolving the question of whether he'll postpone the higher education his parents want for him instead of sticking around his hometown to work as a fisherman and stay with the woman of whom his mother disapproves;

• When the father, Matt (Tom Wilkinson), gets the phone call imparting the worst news of his life, he answers it neutrally and remains impassive for the rest of the shot, which is silent until it's broken into by the sounds of Eastern European choral folk music;

• The mother, Ruth (Sissy Spacek), teaches Eastern European choral folk music, the narrative/ontological value of which is limited to providing appropriately melancholy backdrop;

• When a lawyer tells the couple, in response to their grief, "Dr. Fowler, Mrs. Fowler, I understand," Ruth retorts, "You can't understand;"

• Matt is well-known among his friends for taking too long to place his bid in poker games, and to spur him on, one of his buddies is given to reciting 19th century poetry; in the first game we see after the son's death, no one says anything to hurry Matt, and so when Matt demands they stop pussyfooting around him and egg him on as they used to, the poet breaks into Longfellow's "My Lost Youth";

• An early point of tension between the couple is Ruth's derision toward Matt's decision to put up a swingset to accommodate the children of their son's (considerably older, not-yet-divorced) lover; when Matt finally takes down the swingset, it could not be more indelibly presented as signpost that he's moving onto a new stage of the grieving process if it were lit with flashing neon lights;

• Their son's murderer is a white-trash type, but because the witness to the killing didn't actually see the gunshot, and because the accused is the son of most prominent businessman in town, he's able to get out on bail;

If the plot is an unbelievable, soggy house of cards, what does that say about the characters? When the deck is stacked against characters like it is here, you don't feel the frisson of accompanying someone through a difficult decision; 90 percent of the time, Matt and Ruth are basically walking Skinner boxes filigreed with seething tensions and baleful glances.

Movies certainly don't require ironclad plausibility and don't have to strive for realism, but that's what In the Bedroom is being breathlessly overpraised for, when really the characters' climactic shouting match seems trite and not at all revelatory — it's drama in that pop psychology sense of a traumatic event that you subconsciously re-enact. (And yet, it explains very little of the characters' real trauma; it just brings its blandness into sharper focus.) That the characters do manage to dredge up a surprise the other 10 percent of the time makes the movie more compelling — Ruth tells Matt what you're left to presume is a lie in a Lady-MacBeth attempt to force an action on his part — but it's not enough. Good story design is when you make your characters' choices seem unlikely but nevertheless inevitable; bad, or at least less good, story design is when your characters' choices are mechanically inevitable like in a Charles Bronson film. It's not for no reason that Village Voice critic J. Hoberman calls the film a "granola Death Wish."

Is the movie about vigilantism, as many have suggested? Not really; the movie fails to elicit any particular venom against the legal system because you can see from the outset how the game is rigged such that an unfavorable outcome in court is taken for granted as a link in a chain. Is the movie about classism in small towns? Sadly, no; in fact, the movie assiduously avoids the topic, despite having the son of two professionals romantically involved with a gas station attendant; despite the murderer being released on account of a social privilege that runs counter to his general lowlifedness; despite a protracted scene in which the icy, grieving mother is clearly in agony while trying to make small talk with an obviously less educated woman — it all just sits there like bricks that have never seen mortar.

What In the Bedroom appears to be about is exacting impressions of passive-agressive marital strife — those seething tensions and baleful glances — which few people found new when Ordinary People came out in 1980. You can read a lot into why these two people are the way they are; in fact, you can read anything into why these two people are the way they are. The movie never deigns to acknowledge that it understands why the characters do what they do; is the anguish in this scene sorrow, or vengeance? This becomes particularly sticky at the denouement, which is left wide open: Was Ruth using and manipulating Matt as retribution against Matt for his earlier tirade? Or is Matt getting back at Ruth, as Roger Ebert suggests? Has Matt come to doubt how much comfort he can expect from vengeance? From his wife? Is he just exhausted from the emotion of his ordeal? What was it about the warm picture of the murderer and his wife that struck him? That he didn't used to be such a bastard? That even people with murder in their hearts can receive love? Does Matt find comfort in this? Is he alienated by it? Is it a dodge to say that it's a sign of the film's complexity that it leaves all of these distinctions up to you?

The only one of those questions I can answer definitely is the last one: Yes, it is. There's a lot going on in the movie, a lot of sublimated desires beneath Matt and Ruth's surfaces, but it's not enough to give those desires to Wilkinson and Spacek as Method motivations. That's not intended as left-handed praise for what Sidney Lumet calls the "rubber ducky" school of drama, as in, "My rubber ducky was stolen when I was a child and that's why I am the way I am," a la Ordinary People. But there has to be a middle ground — for a movie this po-faced to elicit so many different readings isn't a sign of the filmmakers' sophistication; it's a sign of professional lassitude.

This is not to say that In the Bedroom lacks sophistication, or should be avoided. Field shows a fine hand for subtleties — all the ways that the title is played out over the course of the movie, for instance, from a scene on a lobster boat to the movie's last shot, or the way in which he's able to make each of the movie's numerous couples distinct but still adherent to his main themes. You just wish for a stronger hand down there undergirding those subtleties. In the Bedroom is a first feature, and Field is allowed rookie mistakes; what's concerning is that the people who should know better are writing these flaws off as minor or, worse, sublime.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)