In the Bedroom

...In the Bedroom is a canny adaptation...

...There is nothing sinister about any of this...

...The isolation of grief drives husband and wife apart...

...Matt visits his son's room for the first time, where the pillow still bears an indentation from the boy's head: these are snapshots of unbearable pain...

...Their son was never good enough for her, he accuses...

...Richard provokes several increasingly violent encounters...

...No one should have to hear that kind of thing," Matt says, apologizing afterward...

...It's a fine treatment, far gentler than Dubus's, of the illusion that we can indeed earn happiness...

...The last third of the film follows the frustrating unraveling of the criminal case against the ex-husband, and Matt's deliberations over whether to take matters into his own hands...

...We get to know Ruth, a high school music teacher with a Ph.D., the sort of culturally ambitious person-surely an immigrant from someplace like Cambridge (her license plate reads "Art Gal")-who has her tenth-grade choir singing Bosnian music...

...where the story deployed its killing quickly and took up the mechanics and metaphysics of revenge, Field lets us spend time with the Fowler family before Frank's death...

...An utterly routine summer implodes in anguish...

...The brilliant insight of this movie is to reveal how the routine complexities of family life are criminalized by grief: how the usual ways in which we construe and position one another for our own emotional needs-the deep themes of our interactions with one another-are remorselessly pushed to the surface and made the material of explicit charge and countercharge...

...His fantasies aren't really sexual so much as existential...

...When, after a fist-fight in which Natalie's husband opens a cut on Frank's face serious enough to require stitches, the two disagree about calling the cops-Matt can't bring himself to think it's a manly thing to do- you feel a shiver, knowing that the seed of a future agonized moment of blame has just been sown...

...for not wanting a second child back when they could have had one...

...In the Bedroom makes it clear that Matt and Ruth have been irrevocably damaged...

...It gives us people rather than plot, and gives them in the fullness of mixed motives...

...But he was revered by other writers, a storyteller whose fictions mixed quiet dismay with unexpected moments of transcendence, and whose Catholic ethos infused his New England mill town settings with an earnest, obdurate impulse toward grace...

...and, most perilously, for having used Frank to satisfy his own vicarious fantasies of Natalie...

...Frank died," she spits at him, "for your fantasy piece of ass...

...It is the least compelling part of the movie, perhaps because it is the least consequential...

...While remaining true to the events of Dubus's story, and using much of its dialogue, Field enlarges the emphasis and changes the feel, making it far more generous...

...If you haven't seen the movie, you might save this review for afterward, because I'm about to give away the plot...

...In the Bedroom is a distinctly literary film, and not merely because Matt's poker buddies have a habit of quoting Blake and Longfellow...

...Todd Field's In the Bedroom is that rare creature, a film that takes a good work of literature and makes it better...

...Field and his co-screenwriter, Robert Festinger, keep digging down into the individual agendas that lie beneath family life...

...Matt and Ruth are healthy, sane, essentially happy people of good will driven wild by grief...

...It comes in waves, and then nothing," Ruth says to the family minister...

...To live is to feel, and to feel is to love...

...Ruth's and Matt's are the kind of dissimilarities that make for easy marital repartee in good times, even as they point to potential conflict in bad...

...Forgiveness is both irrelevant-the film's ending is animated not by Christian theology/but by the psy-chodynamics of loss-and impossible...

...It's breathtaking, the furious, crazed comprehensiveness of blame...

...only in the aftermath of disaster do they become toxic...

...The flirtatious and frankly sexy Natalie has two small sons and a jealous, estranged husband, Richard (William Mapother), who considers her his property and wants her back...

...In the Bedroom serves up these quietly pleasurable days, showing the innocent fun of a picnic with family and friends, or of Frank and Matt taking Natalie's boys out lob-stering...

...when he spends his lunch breaks hustling down to the docks to see him, we understand he's assessing the life he might have lived, including the kind of passionate, uncomplicated woman he might have ended up with if he hadn't married an ambitious and high-strung outsider...

...it closes with what might be the saddest sunrise ever captured on film...

...The early scenes of the film are drenched in a convergence-of-the-twain anticipation of disaster, the violent husband drawing ever closer not merely to Frank, but to Matt and Ruth themselves, or rather to their happiness- their glow of unexamined satisfaction, that falls just short of complacency...

...While the film's opening scene showed Natalie and Frank cavorting in a sunny summer field-"I'm in love with you," she says, "I can feel my life, you know...

...In bed Matt and Ruth lie reading and knitting at night, and their talk segues into gentle sexual teasing...

...Their marriage becomes a terrible mutual prosecution...

...and Matt, local boy made good, a friendly town doctor who's happy playing cards with the workingmen he grew up among...

...And Matt gives back blow for blow...

...and yet there's no way around it...

...Dubus's muted brand of Iron John macho has been expunged...

...After the horror of the killing, In the Bedroom radically changes pace, assuming a look and feel of anguish-short takes with little dialogue, and long fade-outs that are like black borders around muted vignettes of grief...

...In the Bedroom does what good art does with awful predicaments: You feel the dread of knowing not only that this could be you, but that it would be...

...Sometimes I can hardly look at you...

...The movie derives from a Dubus short story, "Killings," set in a small town in coastal Maine, and for those of you who disregarded my advice, here's the plot: A middle-aged doctor and his teacher wife, Matt and Ruth Fowler (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek), are living with their son, Frank (Nick Stahl), a bright twenty-two-year-old spending a post-college-graduation summer working as a lob-sterman while enjoying a tender fling with a thirtyish local woman, Natalie (Marisa Tomei...

...She blames her husband: for not calling the cops...

...The accusations Ruth and Matt hurl at one another are terrible distortions...

...and if their son turned to a girl like Natalie, it's Ruth who is to blame: "he went there because of you-because you are so controlling, so overbearing...

...they pass one another wordlessly in the house, tight-lipped and grim...

...Ruth, we understand, is holding in an ocean of rage (Spacek's haggard face as she sits chain-smoking and staring blankly at late-night TV is a harrowing study in anguish), and finally it all comes pouring out...

...for being unfeeling in the wake of their son's death...

...I feel so angry...

...Frank could never talk to Ruth, he charges...

...Vengeance may hold a primitive necessity, but it offers neither redemption nor relief...

...Unin-sistently, Field sets up the deep, comfortable harmonies of happy middle age-the orderly universe of work and family that is about to be violently disordered...

...but by the end of this somber meditation on grief and family, there's nothing left but the numbed sensation of loss.nsation of loss...

...Indeed, such realities form the undercurrents of any family's life...

...and then one day, in an enraged confrontation at Natalie's house, he pulls a gun and kills Frank...

...For instance, when Ruth fears that her son's involvement with Natalie will derail his success (he's supposed to go to graduate school in the fall), she's saying that staying to marry in one's small hometown equals failure-and implicitly casting herself as both agent and symbol of Matt's success...

...Everything he did was wrong to you, Ruth...

...Director Field takes his cue from a single line, early in Dubus's story, describing Matt's abiding faith in "the small pleasures he believed he had earned...the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood...

...Ruth sorts through the mail, coming across a sweepstakes offering for Frank...

...Matt, meanwhile, a fisherman's son himself, is living vicariously through his son...