REVIEWED - THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR: The challenge of compressing a full-length novel into a two-hour feature film has been the unmaking of many a screenwriter. In his adaptation of John Irving's 576-page novel, A Widow for One Year, writer-director Tod Williams made the imaginative and, it transpires, eminently sensible decision to concentrate on the first third of the book. The resulting film, The Door in the Floor, stands as a self-sufficient dramatic entity in its own right.
In a scenario that recalls the set-up of Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, a naïve student, Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) is dropped into the relationship between an older, married couple whose marriage is disintegrating. Ted and Marion Cole (Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger) live on Long Island with their four-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning, sister of the prolific Dakota) and are still struggling to come to terms with the loss of their teenage sons in an accident.
Marion grieves openly, whereas Ted has escaped into heavy drinking, an adulterous affair with a neighbour (Mimi Rogers), and immersion in his work as a writer and illustrator of children's books. When Ted takes Eddie on as his assistant for a summer, the consequences are eventful and ultimately cathartic. Although Eddie, who is 17, enters the household as a potential surrogate for their sons, he comes to represent a sexual threat that gradually unhinges Ted, the writer he admires so much.
Following on from his promising feature début with The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, which was consigned directly to video here, Williams updates the setting of Irving's novel from 1958 to the present, treating the tragedy and dark humour at the core of the story with maturity and visual flair, and judiciously drawing on Irving's distinctive dialogue.
After the debacle that was Simon Birch, the misfired adaptation of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, the author has exerted greater control over the screen treatments of his work, providing his own adaptation of The Cider House Rules and commanding approval of the screenplay, title and key cast for The Door in the Floor, a melancholy drama that registers as the most satisfying film drawn from his novels since George Roy Hill's underrated The World According to Garp (1982).
Crucial to the simmering dramatic power of the new film is the intense portrayal of Ted Cole in all his tormented complexity by the gifted and versatile Bridges, who is at the top of his form here. In her second film with Bridges after Nadine, Basinger persuasively captures the pain and conflicted emotions of his wife, while rising actor Foster acquits himself impressively in such experienced company.
