Film's tragedy meets humor

Characters deal with loss in 'The Door in the Floor.'
By CHRISTY LEMIRE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The first 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A Widow for One Year" provide the basis for "The Door in the Floor."
The result is a film that couldn't be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy.
Like the best adaptations of Irving's books -- especially "The World According to Garp" -- "The Door in the Floor" really captures the author's method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material -- for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day -- but he kept Irving's spirit and much of his language intact.
"The Door in the Floor" will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a more recent film, "In the Bedroom" from 2001. Both are anguished, excellent, and both accurately convey the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting, ways.
Plot
Marion Cole (Kim Basinger) is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted (Jeff Bridges), a children's book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, N.Y., in hopes of starting over and moving on.
Ted's method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he's telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily -- effectively abandoning her when she needs him most.
As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he's lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer and teenager Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas' teacher, for the summer.
Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness when he arrives and doesn't quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he's so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.)
Eddie's purpose
We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted's schlep work, but to service Marion's needs, as well. He becomes the sons she's lost and the lover she's pushed away, and we don't know until the very end whether this was Ted's intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events.
That Ted is aware that his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie's many surprising quirks.
Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father's absence -- Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of "I Am Sam" -- and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly.
Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn't as clear-cut as he originally thought. Throughout the process, though, he never loses his innate sweetness.
He has some graphic -- though realistically awkward -- sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since "L.A. Confidential," which earned her an Oscar. Some will gripe that she's not really "acting," but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film's emotion, are evidence that less really can be more.
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