Among the films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, my choice would have been “In the Bedroom.” It ultimately lost out to “A Beautiful Mind” but I still prefer this film. Incidentally, the title refers, not to human sleeping quarters, but rather to the compartment on a fishing boat in which lobsters are placed before being sold.
My reason for favoring “In the Bedroom” was not only the memorable performances of Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson as parents of the young man who is murdered, nor the film’s engrossing plot with its suspense and surprising conclusion. Nor did I favor it because of its New England setting – – a small coastal town in Maine. To me it was the spiritual themes raised by this movie that made it altogether special.
Such themes would not surprise anyone familiar with the stories of the late Andre Dubus. This Haverhill-based writer often dealt with the spiritual implications of human predicaments, memorably so because he was such a skilled artist. As the Atlantic Monthly once said of him, “Dubus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart.”
One of his stories, called “Killings,” provided the inspiration of this fine film. This story does not rank as one of Dubus’s major narratives, but it contains the seed of good art transferable to another medium.
For identifying and analyzing two of the spiritual themes I am indebted to the film critic of Commonweal, Rand Richards Cooper. His excellent review of “In the Bedroom” appeared in January and stimulated me to reflect on the film’s meaning.
The first theme that Cooper helped me appreciate is related to the comfortable atmosphere in which the parents live. They are good people who live a life marked by “the comfortable harmonies of happy middle age.” Their work – – he is a doctor, she is a school choir director – – satisfies them and makes them revered in their small-town Maine community.
The violence that soon breaks out destroys this idyllic harmony and shatters an illusion. That illusion, in the words of the critic, is “that we can indeed earn happiness.” Instead of counting happiness a gift, the parents, Matt and Ruth Fowler, think it the product of their own efforts.
Who does not welcome the idea that we deserve the happiness we work to achieve? This is an illusion that comforts everyone who experiences it. But spirituality would suggest otherwise, that happiness is surprisingly rare and, again, arrived at by gift rather than by personal achievement.
In time, things fall apart, much to the anguish of Ruth and Matt. In superbly acted scenes, they bitterly accuse one another of negligence in the death of their son. It is painful to watch a couple, formerly so close, become vindictive against each other, making their horrendous loss even worse.
Analyzing this sequence, the critic Cooper points out how grief such as the parents’ over the loss of their son can distort everything. The ordinary ways in which they have related to one another over many years of marriage are suddenly painfully twisted out of shape. We learn how destructively people can act toward one another, what terrible accusations they can make against loved ones when they are overwhelmed by grief.
Part of the power in this section of the film comes from the realization of us viewers that grief in those circumstances could do the same thing to us. As Cooper says: “‘In the Bedroom’ does what good art always does with awful predicaments: You feel the dread of knowing not only that this could be you, but that it would be.”
Without giving away the ending of the film, I can identify yet another powerful spiritual theme. Violence does not solve anything. Revenge leaves the avenger where he was before except that it makes things worse. Whatever the provocation, one cannot bring back victims of violence by murdering murderers. Vengeance cannot restore things to what they once were.
This film is surely not for everyone; most of us have to be in a special mood to confront such hard truths. But marvelous acting and skilled direction have made this a movie you can feel passionate about and at the same time prize for what it says about human life.
Richard Griffin