The Door in the Floor (2004)

Plodding action and not believable characterizations throughout. Nudity by Bridges in lead role with child actor present in scene shows bad judgment on everyone's part, especially the director and the child's real life parents.Kim Basinger is mostly one dimensional and near catatonic in some scenes. Script copies other, better films like "The Summer of '42". Mimi Rogers is a nude body in one scene and a flaming hysteric in another scene; just another case of desperation and overacting on her part.Don't believe the glowing reviews. An irresponsible boring mess of a movie.

After a tragic accident took the life of their two teen-aged sons, children's book author Jeff Bridges (as Theodore "Ted" Cole) and his still beautiful wife Kim Basinger (as Marion) moved to wealthy East Hampton, Long Island. Presently, their marriage is falling apart. He invites women over to model and orders them to strip for sexually suggestive illustrations. She mournfully keeps pictures of dead sons Thomas and Timothy around the house and takes lonely walks on the beach. To help around the house and fill a void left by his deceased sons, Mr. Bridges hires a good-looking young man to spend the summer as his assistant. After being driven home by pretty-in-pink Ms. Basinger, young hire Jon Foster (as Edward "Eddie" O'Hare) is invited to shower with Bridges...You know either Bridges or Basinger will be having sex with Mr. Foster before very long. When Foster fails to pick up on sexy sitter Bijou Phillips (as Alice) saying, "not my type," you're wagering on Bridges. But when Foster gets chummy with Basinger's bra and panties, all bets are off. The older woman, younger man duo start doing it all over the house. Neither he nor she desires privacy, so Bridges and model-perfect preteen daughter Elle Fanning (as Ruth) find out. A part-time nudist, Bridges only regrets that his little girl had to see it "doggie style." After a flashback, it all leads to "The Door in the Floor". Although they don't try to be, the situation and characters are most uninteresting. You probably have to read the book to understand it completely.***** The Door in the Floor (6/18/04) Tod Williams ~ Jeff Bridges, Jon Foster, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers

Tod Williams served as both director and screenwriter for this drama, adapted from a portion of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year in this movie,The Door In The Floor.It stars Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger together with Jon Foster and Bijou Phillips.Ted and Marion Cole are a couple whose marriage is on the verge of collapse. After their two teenage sons died in an auto accident, Marion fell into a deep depression from which she has never fully emerged. Meanwhile, Ted has drifted into repeated infidelity, his most recent mistress being the sexually ravenous Mrs. Vaughn and neither Ted nor Marion are willing or able to devote their full attention to their surviving daughter,Ruth. Ted, a successful author of books for children, hires Eddie, a bright 16-year-old prep-school student, to help him edit his latest manuscript. But Ted is fully aware that Eddie bears a striking resemblance to one of his late sons which would would have a powerful effect on Marion. Eddie quickly develops a strong attraction to his employer's beautiful wife, and Marion, torn between grief and desire, draws him into a sexual relationship that brings the family's many emotional crises to the breaking point. This is a complex, candid, and satisfying movie that brings back to the socially provocative films. It is an adult drama with characters you sympathize with in spite of their immoral behavior.Also,Jeff Bridges demonstrates once again that he is one of the finest actors with his great performance as Ted.Finally,this is one of the better adaptations of a John Irving novel.

"The Door in the Floor" is, from the beginning, a modernist fable. The title sequence shows close-ups of drawings in a children's book and a subtly buoyant but haunting score plays. These two elements foreshadow the combination of satire and dramatic truth to follow, which is exactly the combination you need to properly translate a John Irving novel (this one is based on "A Widow for One Year") to screen. "The Door in the Floor" currently holds the distinction of being the most successful such translation.In "A Widow for One Year," the story follows a woman named Ruth Cole from girlhood to an adulthood in Amsterdam hiding in a closet from a prostitute-murderer. The book ends with Ruth attempting to reconcile her emotionally manipulative relationship with her father and her absent one with her mother. "The Door in the Floor," adapted and directed by Tod Williams, only covers Ruth's childhood and the focus is on the crumbling marriage of her parents, Ted and Marion Cole, and their manipulation of a young man named Eddie.5-year-old Ruth is fascinated with photographs that pepper the hallway walls of her older brothers, who died as teenagers in a car accident (it's explained straightaway) before she was born. Her father Ted (a never-better Jeff Bridges) is a children's book writer and the title of the movie is taken from the title of one of those fake children's books. Ruth's mother Marion (a similarly career-best Kim Basinger) is a woman withdrawn and, in one of the movie's first scenes, Ted asks her for a separation. They share the main house and a small apartment alternately, a week or so each at a time. In the same scene just mentioned, Ted also announces he's hired a young assistant for the summer: Eddie (Jon Foster's breakthrough role). In an ironic(?) twist, Eddie happens to look like those deceased sons and he and Marion eventually start an affair. From there, the film follows the intertwined lives of these three over one summer, Eddie acting as intermediary between these two deeply wounded people. "The Door in the Floor" is a character study. Parents of children who've died young always strike me as alternately connected and detached, like they've realized something essential of life and feel guilty about it and this film illuminates that possibility in both Ted and Marion. They are two sides of a distressed, worn coin. Ted has adulterous relationships with other women under the pretense of his art; he draws them naked, but his attitude in a particular scene with Mimi Rogers as his model is one of condescension, making her believe he is liberating her when he is actually humiliating her. He treats Marion and Eddie similarly. Marion, on the other hand, treats Eddie with care, nurturing him. You sense this is probably very much the same way their relationships with their sons were, Ted the scrutinizing father and Marion the encouraging mother. That Marion's relationship with Eddie becomes sexual has no incestuous bearing. I think the guilt the characters of Ted and Marion experience day-to-day is what motivates most of their actions.They are largely unsympathetic, so it's to the credit of Bridges and Basinger (both of whom, while I don't generally go for awards-show-snobbery, were unjustly snubbed come awards season) that they are so rich and layered. Part of that is helped by Williams' palette choice. The film is awash in muted grays, browns and blues, with splashes of peach and lavender. It helps the rich dialogue shine and serves to enhance the satire of the situation, much the way "Sideways" uses the California countryside to the same effect. The world of the Coles is surreal to Eddie (whose introductory scene, before he's entered this universe, is set in deep browns and oranges, setting the stage for just how out-of-his-element this young man will be) and the color scheme and voyeuristic, hazy cinematography keep the audience as continually blindsided as Eddie by the on-screen actions. Williams has made an ambitious decision to drop 2/3's of a book in making a movie based on it, but it works brilliantly because he lets the characters grow and shrink on their own. To paraphrase a line in "Wonder Boys" - He respects his audience enough to forget us and the result is a film with not a single moment that feels false. It's the fairy tale of the 21st century: twisted, comical, tragic and true.If nothing else, see this film for Bridges and Basinger alone. These are among the best performances any American actor has given.