Jeff Bridges chalks up another excellent performance in another unsatisfactory movie with “The Door in the Floor.” This is a grown-up picture that comes as something of a relief in the silly season, despite its flaws.
The movie is based on one section of a John Irving novel, “A Widow for One Year.” We travel inside the household of a pompous, bohemian and quite wealthy author of children’s books. He lives in the Hamptons, I guess, or some ritzy oceanside area on the East Coast.
This is Ted Cole (Bridges), who shares the home with his wife Marion (Kim Basinger) and little daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning). A cloud hangs over the Cole household: the death, in a car accident a few years earlier, of the Coles’ two teenage sons.
This will be a summer of separation for a worn-out Ted and Marion. They will trade off time at the house while they explore other options.
An outsider arrives, as though to witness this eccentric arrangement. He’s college boy Eddie (Jon Foster), who’s going to spend the summer as Ted’s “assistant,” whatever that means, in hopes of gleaning some valuable literary knowledge from a famous writer.
Of course, most of Eddie’s activities consist of running errands for Ted. So he has plenty of time to become infatuated with the depressed Marion, who does not brush off his attention.
She’s 40ish and Eddie is still a teenager, so the film gets into some daring territory. Underlying this, in a melancholy way, is the fact that Eddie is not much older than Marion’s sons were when they were killed.
“The Door in the Floor” veers uncertainly between Marion’s affair and the ongoing comic-dramatic mess of Ted’s life. An illustrator as well as an author, he is having a fling with his art model (Mimi Rogers, in a thankless role mostly involving nudity).
Bridges has created a terrific, fully breathing character here. Ted has the shaggy hair and high self-regard of an orchestra conductor. He pads around his compound in a billowy caftan and a ridiculous Panama hat, sipping wine and cutting slivers from a giant wheel of cheese.
He has a brilliant scene late in the film when he tries to seduce a 20-something girl with her mother sitting right there. An incorrigible character.
The movie does well at suggesting the ways Ted and Marion manipulate each other by whacking Eddie between them like a ping-pong ball. But despite some of these observations, director Tod Williams can’t often kick the material into life. He previously made “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,” which had similar problems.
There’s also the issue of Basinger’s wooden performance, which freezes her otherwise intriguing role. The appealing Jon Foster does well at sticking to his guns amidst these big names. Unfortunately, except for Bridges, none of this emerges as particularly memorable.
Associated Press
Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges star in “The Door in the Floor.”
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