I’ve watched three movies in the last couple of weeks and In the Bedroom was by far the most satisfying, even if a little ponderous at times. The other two were Hitchcock’s Notorius and a Val Kilmer thriller called Spartan. I was disappointed with Notorious, I think mainly because I found the morality of the situation it described so distasteful – a beautiful woman (Ingrid Bergman no less) is induced to marry a German conspirator in order to elicit information for US intelligence. Strike two for Hitchcock in my recent viewing.
Spartan was worse. It was about a US Ranger who rescues a politician’s daughter from a human trafficing ring in Dubai. I won’t say more except that language and violence advisories apply.
In the Bedroom was a movie I had resisted watching for some time. I knew it had received critical acclaim, but the title just didn’t sound like something I was going to enjoy. Fortunately, the connection between the title and the theme of the movie was fairly tenuous. A young man gets involved with an older woman (she looked pretty young to me – I guess I’m getting old 
), and ends up getting murdered by her ex-husband. At that point the movie seemed to go into slow motion as it examined the impact of the murder on the lives of his parents, and to a lesser degree his girlfriend. Eventually, his father decides to murder the guy who killed his son. The movie ends with him lying on his bed, evidentally agonizing over what he has done.
What I thought was really interesting about this movie was that you could see the corrosive influence of the bitterness held by the young man’s mother. She could not forgive. She could not accept the tragedy and move on. It haunted her, and in turn her husband. Eventually, killing the murderer was the only way they could find to satisfy their own need for justice and retribution. Yet when the deed was done, we see them left with the awfulness of the deed they have commited, and still with the burden of having lost their son. A very sad story, and yet I think a very dramatic portrayal of what things can be like for people who have no view beyond this life to enable them to cope with tragedy and injustice.