Spoiler Alert - In the Bedroom

One of the most disappointing movies I’ve ever seen is a film called “In the Bedroom.” I was looking forward to seeing it for a number of reasons; the plot was intriguing, it had two of my favorite actors – Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek- and it had a Thomas Newman score. It didn’t hurt that it was set in Maine either.

Wilkinson and Spacek are Matt and Ruth Fowler and their college age-son (Nick Stahl) is dating a somewhat older woman (Marisa Tomei) who has two children and a jealous ex-husband (William Mapother). The movie takes its time, but doesn’t waste ours, showing us the characters and how they relate with one another. As we get to know them we can almost see what’s coming, the ex-husband kills the son. The legal system is headed to an unsatisfactory end. It’s is unlikely the prosecutor can get a murder conviction and will likely accept a lesser pleading, probably manslaughter. While all that is being worked out the ex-husband, the killer is out on bail.

Matt and Ruth see him regularly in their small town. We watch as they go through what one reviewer described as the paralyzing impotence of grief. It’s tough to watch but thoroughly engrossing film-making. The acting is superb. So what makes it so disappointing? The ending. What seems to produce resolution for the story, Matt kills his son’s murderer, doesn’t work for the characters or the movie. To me it was a cheat on the rest of the movie and particularly annoying because the rest of the film is so good. But the ending just didn’t fit with the characters. They were real and the film didn’t have a real ending, it had a movie ending. No disrespect to the Governor of California but it had an Arnold Schwarzenegger ending.

Okay, but the movie came out in 2001 so why bring it up now? Because I was reading Dick Cavett’s blog in the New York Times on line and he wrote this…

“Dominick Dunne…was a great talk show guest. When he launched quietly into one of his murder tales, you could hear a pin strike the floor.

Maybe his most amazing accomplishment was living with the knowledge that the man who murdered his daughter served less than four years in prison, then lived in the same town (L.A.) as Dominick. ‘How can you manage not to be consumed with rage and fantasies of revenge?’ I asked him once, and he said, ‘You can’t.’ We agreed that killing him would be poor revenge, relieving him of all life’s problems. My suggestion — letting him out in the desert with a bullet through both knees — failed to shock him. “That pales beside my fantasies,” he said.”

Sad as it is, that ending makes more sense than the movie’s ending did.