Door In The Floor

Adapted by director Tod Williams from the John Irving novel, "A Widow For A Year", Door In The Floor delivers solid craftsmanship without ever engaging emotionally. Perhaps there is something about the measured intelligence of Irving's style, with its graceful New England literariness and WASPish frame of reference (compare for instance other Irving adaptations such as The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules) that inhibits effective cinematic translation and there is certainly a sense here that some external force has robbed the director of gonadal drive.

Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger play a couple, Ted and Marion, whose marriage has foundered since the death of their college-age sons. When Ted hires teenager, Eddie (Jon Foster), as an assistant for the summer, Marion comes briefly to life.

Bridges is in his usual charmingly sardonic, dishevelled rogue mode and Basinger is sweetly fragile but her ready slide into a sexual dalliance with the callow Eddie is an incongruous counterpoint to Ted's lecherous philanderings and the story unfolds with an implausible tidiness, peppering the overall tone of melancholy with equally incongruous comedy (basically the whole Ted/Mrs Vaughn situation). Foster is of the Tobey Maguire school of bland young men (see The Cider House Rules) and why either adult takes him seriously is never apparent. For someone caught in such an emotional maelstrom he remains curiously calm and self-possessed throughout but then that's typically Irving - detached to the core. And as to what the final scene is about, that's anyone guess.

Door In The Floor passes the time respectably enough as a reasonably entertaining film but as for offering an image of the human condition, which is surely its central objective, it doesn't convince.

 

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