All the talk about this flick has been about Spacey's performance. She is a fine actress and does a great job portraying a mother who is "controlling" in her family. Perhaps her character is not as brittle as Mary Tyler Moore's mother in Ordinary People,, but they reside in similar territory. Spacek is a the wife of a small town coastal Maine doctor, the mother to a sweet best little boy in the world, now about to go off to college, and is the director of a girls choir that sings Balkan folk music.
The almost breathtaking performance was, however, by Tom Wilkinson, the British actor who played Spacek's doctor husband. He is the son of a Maine lobster fisherman, and he still owns a boat and knows how to do the trade. Wilkinson acts through his eyes. His calm demeanor masks familial love, anger, lust and pain. But his eyes give hints of all of these emotions.
The bedroom of the title refers to the lobster traps. But as others have pointed out, it is also a telling reference to the private lives, their love, fear and anger.
The sweet kid son (Nick Stahl)is spending his last summer before college running lobster traps and dating Marisa Tomei, an older woman separated from her husband, and mother to two small boys.
Almost immediately, we learn that Tomei's husband (William Mapother) wants his family back and that he is not above slapping either wife or her sweet kid boyfriend around. This sets up the violence that feeds the rest of the movie.
Akin to The Sweet Hereafter, the story is told slowly. And like that fine movie, we slowly watch the effects of violence and death as it eats on the survivors. We learn less from exposition than from static shots. The director, Todd Field, doesn't appear afraid to let a scene go on, with pauses in dialogue, without lots of soundtrack music to set up and punctuate plot points.
Each member of the Doctor's family appears inarticulate. The doctor at times cannot even decide how to bet at his weekly poker game. The mother crudely conducts her choir without much passion or sense of rhythm (they could have prepared her better on her conducting), giving her girls a thumbs up as her most excited gesture to music that sounds alien and cold and distant. The son cannot explain his love for Tomei or his feelings about college. There are drawings in his room that speak of ambition and desire to be an architect that are rarely addressed by words.
The evil wifebeater, a bad character, also happens to be the son of the local factory owner, yet the references to this wealth, and the impact on the other character's responses to his violence, are rarely if at all stated.
Field does not mock his characters. And long after the movie is over, the image of a tired Wilkinson, in his bed, staring back at us, lingers on.
