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Writer Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and his wife Marion (Kim Basinger) are going through a rough patch in their marriage, and apparently have been ever since their sons were killed in a car accident some years before. Ted takes on Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster) as an assistant for the summer, largely because he needs someone to drive him around. Eddie is taken with Marion and the two end up in a sexual relationship.

Plot-wise, there just isn’t that much going on in The Door in the Floor, but that’s not its problem. The problem is what fills the void left by the plot – flat, shallow characters who fail to convey any significant emotions, aren’t likable or worth following, and, worst of all, don’t actually change over the course of the film. That leaves us with two hours of, well, nothing – with no trajectory either to the plot or the characters’ movements in it, The Door in the Floor just lies there, hoping that if it shows enough sex no one will notice how boring it is.

Based on one section of John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, The Door in the Floor just feels like one of those movies where plots and depth from the source material were pulled out of the screenplay because there simply wasn’t enough room for them, but their remnants were left behind in awkward fashion. Characters like Alice, the Coles’ nanny, and Mrs. Vaughn, a subject of Ted’s drawings, have just enough screen time that one senses they played larger roles in the book, but here their parts are minimal enough that they hardly seem necessary at all.

One of the first things stated in Irving’s novel is how much Eddie looks like the Coles’ dead son Thomas; it is only mentioned late in The Door in the Floor and seemingly in passing. Of course, Eddie’s resemblance to Thomas makes his affair with Marion – and her attitude toward him in general – quite unsettling indeed. Perhaps if we learned more about her character this choice would make more sense, but Williams almost seems to be taking pains to keep the film’s characters as enigmatic as possible. What, really, do we learn about Ted? He’s a children’s author and he’s something of a womanizer. Eddie? He’s an aspiring writer and a hormonal high school junior. Marion? A grieving mother, I guess. Not one of these characters exists in three dimensions. It’s bad enough that Williams doesn’t do anything significant with what is there; the fact that so little is even there to begin with is much worse.

Bridges at least gives a strong performance, but he’s the only one who does so and it’s fairly irrelevant anyway. If The Door in the Floor actually raises a question worth discussing, it’s this one: is there any real use behind a good acting performance when it’s in service of a bad character? Bridges may be able to convince us that Ted is who Williams wants him to be, but that’s no one worth caring about in any way, not even a negative one; Ted may be a creep, but he’s not an interesting enough creep to hate.

Neither Foster nor Basinger is particularly good, but then it doesn’t matter much. Marion is so thin a character she may as well not exist, and while the film seems like the sort that should be setting up Eddie to have a major catharsis at some point during his summer with the Coles, it’s not clear where that catharsis is supposed to be. We never get enough on the character to make any theoretical change noticeable; the Eddie who departs at the end of the summer might have a bit more self-confidence, but that’s hardly a shift around which to turn a film.

The film also tries to act as an exploration of grief, but here too it doesn’t do nearly enough. Ted’s response, engaging in affairs with women he proceeds to degrade, is treated almost farcically; a scene in which a woman he humiliated tries to run him down with her car and chases him with a knife is played for laughs, the only sequence in the movie for which that seems to be the case. Marion’s is simply too one-note to be interesting.

Drearily plotted and inexcusably shallow, The Door in the Floor spends far too much time on the long road to nowhere. With no discernible change in any of the characters from the beginning of the film to the end, it’s almost a perfect example of how not to write a dramatic screenplay. A spare plot may be okay, but no character development means no drama, and if there’s no drama, why should anyone watch in the first place?

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originally posted: 12/18/05 10:50:32
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