In the Bedroom (15)

Small town, big trouble

In the Bedroom comes across as a pretty ordinary American film. In fact, there's barely a conventional signifier of American ordinariness that isn't in here somewhere: the family barbecue, the junior baseball game, the grizzled coots swapping wry glances over poker, local radio in the truck en route to an early morning fishing trip. Director Todd Field so exhaustively piles on these reassuring signs of beneficent dullness that you soon realise that the film is gesturing towards something different – a full-blown American tragedy discreetly hidden away behind clapboard walls.

The well-observed plain-folks melodrama has become something of a rarity in American film these days, although examples from the independent sector crop up fairly regularly at the Sundance Festival, where In the Bedroom scored a hit last year. They also tend to reach our screens in the run-up to the Academy Awards: last spring, we had Kenneth Lonergan's tender but square You Can Count on Me, strong on performances and small-town family dysfunction. In the Bedroom is less likeable than Lonergan's film, but it's made of darker stuff. It won't make a hip name out of first-time director Todd Field, but then he needn't worry, since he's already established as an actor (he was the laconic pianist in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut). Field comes across as a serious, if not studious, rather conservative soul; still, American cinema could use one or two of those at the moment.

His great strengths are his patience and his ability to misdirect you, to keep you waiting and wondering where he's leading you. The film starts with a summer idyll, all long grass and close-up kisses, between a young man (Nick Stahl) and a slightly older woman (Marisa Tomei). The film's a love story, you think. But no, soon you realise it's about family tension. He's the son of a middle-class Maine couple, Matt and Ruth Fowler (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek), and she's a divorced mother, with a loose-cannon ex-husband (William Mapother). The film begins to trace the slow-winding, precariously managed stresses of middle-class Maine life: parental anxieties are tentatively aired, beers are drunk, children taken lobster fishing, and Spacek – somehow, this comes across less bizarrely than it sounds – coaches her school choir in Macedonian traditional songs.

And then, before you know it, Field's elliptical way with narrative leads us neatly towards the inevitable grim left turn, and the Fowlers trade their complacency for grief, mutual distrust, rage. What's unusual about the story – adapted by Rob Festinger and the director, from a story by André Dubus – is its understanding that trauma doesn't bind people together and cause them to display their turmoil, but wedges them apart and makes them batten down the emotional hatches. Field scores a coup with the unlikely but inspired matching of two veteran specialists in emotional repression, British actor Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek, who has deservedly won a Golden Globe as Best Actress for the part.

Wilkinson has developed a rich repertoire of variously stern, weak-chinned or weak-willed men, and you wouldn't obviously see him as an American paterfamilias. But wait till he starts to unpack his weary burden of gravitas. His Matt begins as a soft, jowly embodiment of placid suburban disappointment, but soon works up a furious reined-in intensity, all the more affecting because of his apparent lapses back into musing blankness. His final scene is a sublime vindication of ambiguity – we can never quite know what sort of state we're leaving Matt in.

Spacek, meanwhile, works the nervous tension like a pipe organ: quiet but chilly. Those eerie looks, like an extra-terrestrial pedigree cat, always suggested that she'd age fascinatingly, but this performance unlocks her face's possibilities to devastating effect. Her great scenes here are not the ones where her rage erupts – those seem like standard Oscar opportunities – but the moments when she pulls in all her inexpressible feelings around that taut downturned mouth, and nose tilted upwards with barely containable pique. In a superbly concise scene, Tomei visits her, craving forgiveness and contact: you expect cheap huggy catharsis, but Spacek just looks up, slaps Tomei across the face, then carries on as if she weren't there.

Field has an eye for small social embarrassments, and for telling details that sometimes seem caught on the hop, like two radiant blonde children laughing their heads off – sublimely inopportune, since it's at a funeral. The film is on less firm ground when it hits the emotional buttons directly: a moment of pain is defused awkwardly when a wry old James Stewart type starts reciting Blake at the poker table. You have to be susceptible to corn, even when signalled knowingly as corn, to let this one by.

The film pretty much makes its own rules until the final half-hour, where it turns psychological thriller and slides into a distinctly routine genre register. If Field had left things hanging without recourse to decisive events, this might have been a richer film; it's as though he wants to reward our patience with a too-obvious payoff of moral ambiguity.

Still, the film has a lot of incidental revelations going for it – not least William Mapother's jumpy ex, with his mask-like menace and wartime rake's moustache, and a welcome return for Marisa Tomei, in a slight but sympathetically complex part. There are some memorable images, too, in a film studiously low on style: the last five minutes feature a solemn, narcotised drift through empty small town streets at night. In the Bedroom is not, by any means, the most extraordinary film you'll see all year, but it is a genuinely adult undertaking – and if that suggests a certain stolidity, so be it. Field has the courage to go the full mile in his spareness and sobriety, and he's nothing short of audacious in his all-out refusal to leaven the procedures with token humour. Why, for an American indie production, In the Bedroom is practically French.

j.romney@independent.co.uk