spoiler alert
John Irving's novels have never translated easily to film due to their breadth and length (the Academy Award-winning script for 'The Cider House Rules' took over ten years of tinkering). But the structure of events unfolds in 'A Widow for One Year,' the source novel for 'The Door in the Floor,' in such a way that carving out a section for a screenplay is possible. Unfortunately, writer/director Tod Williams seems to have forgotten that when you leave out the last 320 pages of the story, a new resolution of some satisfaction is required.
Ruth Cole, the 'Widow' of the novel's title, is reduced to a secondary character, as the entire film takes place during the summer of her fourth year. Ruth (Elle Fanning) is the child of Ted and Marion (Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger), who, in a misguided effort to stem their grief over the loss of their teen-aged sons in a car accident (as well as to save their marriage), conceived Ruth.
Sadly, things have only worsened between the Coles, and the story finds them at the nadir of their woe, as Eddie O'Hare (Ben Foster), a young high school student and aspiring writer, gets thrown into the storm of their self-destruction, having signed on for an 'internship' with Ted, a successful author and illustrator of children's books.
Eddie is a wide-eyed innocent, hoping to absorb some sort of insight into what it takes to be a writer from Ted. He shortly discovers that his responsibilities have less to do with literary concerns than with chauffeuring the perpetually drunk Mr. Cole to various homes around the Hamptons for rendezvous with divorcées, babysitting Ruth, and providing companionship for Marion, who is locked in a perpetual stupor of grief. Eddie falls in love and ultimately into bed with the grieving Marion, who finds in him a surrogate for her sons (in a haunting if perverse image, we see Marion mounted atop the arduous Eddie, gazing with longing at a photograph of her sons on the wall above him). As Ted continues to alienate himself, Marion decides to make a break for it, leaving behind her daughter but taking with her all but one of the photographs of her boys that line the hallways. This act of abandonment forms one of the framing questions that drives the novel's narration, but it is the film's final act, and we are left with nothing much more than a shoddily written paean by young Eddie for a resolution (Eddie, interestingly, grows up in the novel to be a bit of a loser, a failed writer whose only connection to the world of literary respectability is Ruth Cole, a successful, award-winning novelist by the time the story resumes after Marion's exit). Marion's escape seems to be meant as a grasp for freedom, but it's hard to admire her for it when you know she's leaving her child behind to be raised by the almost maliciously myopic Ted.
The conclusion seems to mean for the film to be seen as a coming of age drama, but it's hard to imagine what we're supposed to think Eddie has learned (outside of the bedroom, anyway). In the end, the film suffers from an over-seriousness bordering on tedium, and the dialog is painfully artless for a literary adaptation. The big trouble is that, rather than inventing a more thoughtful, logical conclusion, Williams remains faithful to Irving's story, which ends (in this segment, anyway) as a window into a distant future unrecalled or reported in the context of the film. Generally, fidelity to the source novel is a virtue, but here it leaves the story feeling incomplete and void of larger significance outside of the context of spoiled, wealthy New Yorkers pacing stoically through their manse like models posing for a layout in Architectural Digest.
It's hard to fault Tod Williams for his use of setting, however. He sets the film at the Coles' home in the Hamptons, a picturesque den of elegant, WASPy aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, one of the more admirable aspects of the film is its exploitation of the house and the landscape that surrounds it. Williams studied painting in college, and the visual artists' sensibility is on full display here in the landscapes and interior shots he employs almost like still lifes to pace the film and stretch its somber mood between scenes of action and dialog.
Williams films the house beautifully, but fails to bring the same skill to his staging of the scenes or direction of the actors. Jeff Bridges acquaints himself well as Ted Cole, fashioning a boozy, eccentric, larger-than-life figure who is simultaneously repulsive and charismatic. Bridges, however, is arguably the most underrated screen actor of his generation, and brings gifts to the table absent in the rest of the cast. Elle Fanning as Ruth is reduced to nearly nothing. Ben Foster starts out well as the innocent, somewhat pathetic Eddie, but ultimately he is unable to overcome the thin dialog, remaining a bit of a slack-jawed teenager, failing to persuade the audience that he has changed or gained any particular insight. Kim Basinger can be forgiven for her rather stale and tone-deaf performance, since she's given the most difficult job in trying to create sympathy for a woman who seduces her child's teen-aged babysitter and then ultimately abandons her child (she can be forgiven for abandoning her husband).
The film carries an air of artful seriousness, and the circumstances faced by the Cole family are indeed tragic, so some pathos is appropriate, and it's always a pleasure to watch Jeff Bridges at work, even in mediocre fare. But this film is all style and no substance. Williams probably has better work ahead of him; I certainly hope so, anyway.
