IN THE BEDROOM (2001)  **1/2

Reviewed 12/23/01

Highly overpraised is Todd Field’s look at a middle class family besieged with turmoil when its only son falls for a lower class woman attached to an abusive ex-husband.  For the first third of the movie, Field engages in an annoying technique of cutting a scene before it builds up to its expected dramatic peak, basically, saying “you’ve seen it before, so I don’t have to show it to you.”  Letting the audience fill in the dramatic gaps with their own imagination is just being lazy even if it achieves the trick of seeming more effective than it is.  Then there are all the film school student fade-outs.  The middle portion dealing with the father and mother is the most compelling but suffers from lack of clarity over what exactly has and hasn’t happened between them owing to the movie’s previous technique of eluding dramatic scenes.   Finally though, the movie goes off the rails with a fantastic plot turn that is completely at odds with the realist tone and characterization that has come before.  The movie’s saving grace is the performances, especially from Tom Wilkinson and Marisa Tomei.