Release Date: July 14, 2004
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Elle Fanning, Jon Foster, Mimi Rogers
Directed by: Tod Williams
Written by: Tod Williams
Distributed by: Focus Features
MPAA Rating: R (strong sexuality, graphic images, language)
Based on the novel by John Irving, Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor is a pretentious film about family tragedy that has less beneath its surface than it seems to suggest. It takes a page or two from intriguing dramas like In the Bedroom and Moonlight Mile, a pair of films that each had emotionally unsettling truths lurking behind the placid, suburban lifestyles in the foreground. But there is little depth to the plot and characters of The Door in the Floor. Still, solid performances from Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, and the young Elle Fanning make the movie unique and give it a small touch of the profoundness writer-director Williams was clearly hoping to generate.
Our first glimpse into the world of the Cole family is a nicely shot hallway. A small, blonde girl drags a chair across the plain, wooden floor and stops. She lifts herself up, stands on the seat, and looks directly at us. Then a man comes behind her and rests his hands on her shoulders. They’re actually looking at a wall covered with framed photographs of two twin boys. The boys are the girl’s dead brothers, the man’s dead sons.
Jeff Bridges is the father. He’s Ted Cole, an author of children’s books and a husband struggling to maintain a normal, loving marriage with his wife Marion (Basinger). We find out that Ruth (Fanning), their young daughter, is a product of their misery -- they conceived her to fill the void of the dead sons -- but not even her presence has returned a semblance of normalcy to their lives. So Ted decides it would be best to separate from Marion for the summer, and at the same time, he hires a prep-school student named Eddie (Jon Foster) to be his personal assistant.
But the death of their twin children years before is not the only cause of the Coles’ marital problems. Ted turns out to be an eccentric womanizer who is having an affair with his nude model (Mimi Rogers), and Marion is playing Mrs. Robinson and seducing the teenage Eddie, who is now living with Ted.
The Door in the Floor certainly qualifies as a meaty drama because of its dynamic characters, but it constantly has aspirations to be more than it is. It’s not. We’re left to wonder what will happen with Ted and Marion, and whether one of them will seek revenge. Each is aware of the other’s infidelity, so will their actions, fueled by their never-ending grief, become drastic enough to make a powerful statement? Will the young Eddie learn valuable life lessons during his time with the heartbroken couple? Will something (anything?) turn out right in the end?
The answer to each of these questions is no, and in the end, we’re left with a rather unfulfilling movie. Little is settled and little is learned. These characters, as sad as we know they are, remain sad, and moreover, they never redeem themselves. Writer-director Williams wants there to be a moral, and a good amount of intrigue, to the tale, yet the only thing he foreshadows and then actually indulges late in the picture is the story behind the sons’ deaths. When it gets to that point, the revelation arrives with minimal impact -- there isn’t much to it than what we already suspected. It’s this kind of disappointment that makes Williams out to be an amateur storyteller.
There is some point to it all. The story has a strong theme of temptation, and the human weakness for indulgence. The door in the floor is drawn from a line in one of Ted’s books that tells the story of a young boy who is told by his mother not to look under a floor hatch in their house -- a kind of Pandora’s Box. Despite her warning, the boy looks under it, just as any of us would do out of curiosity.
Similarly, each character in the movie succumbs to temptation at some point and suffers the consequences. The Door in the Floor, then, is mostly about the weakness of self-control that often accompanies grief (out of desperation to make things better, people will often try anything) and it’s the actors who personify that grief, making at least part of the story compelling. The rest, a heavy-handed movie with a light and hollow story, isn’t interesting enough to support what Williams thought was the heart of John Irving’s book -- nor for a viewer to spend time watching.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)