Todd Field’s first film, about a Maine couple whose summer is broken by violence, is patient, exact and acted by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek with hardly a raised voice. The last half hour turns into a different film, and not quite as good a one.
Todd Field’s first film as director is adapted, with Robert Festinger, from Andre Dubus’s short story Killings, and it tells you what it is about in a scene it then refuses to point at again. Matt Fowler (Tom Wilkinson), a doctor in a lobster town on the Maine coast, is showing one of his son’s girlfriend’s small boys how a trap works. The compartment at the back, he says, is called the bedroom, and if two lobsters end up in there together they will fight. Field puts that early, lets it go, and spends 131 minutes on the fight.
We recommend it, warmly, with one caveat about its last half hour that we will come to. The first act is a summer: Frank (Nick Stahl) hauling traps before he decides about graduate school, Natalie (Marisa Tomei) and her boys at the Fowlers’ barbecue, Ruth (Sissy Spacek) rehearsing her school choir, poker with Willis (William Wise) while Katie (Celia Weston) talks in the next room. Antonio Calvache shoots it in level coastal daylight from a fixed camera, wide enough that people are small in their rooms, and Frank Reynolds cuts slowly, so that by the time anything happens we know the house.
Natalie’s husband Richard (William Mapother), from whom she is separated but not divorced, keeps turning up. His family owns the fish plant, and Mapother plays him as a man who honestly believes he is the injured party, which is more alarming than a villain would be. What happens at the end of the first act we will not describe, though the tagline gives fair warning. Field stages it as an interruption rather than a set piece. Then the film he actually wanted to make begins, and it belongs to Matt and Ruth.
They grieve in different rooms. Ruth sits in front of the television with a cigarette, the volume low. Matt goes back to his patients, does the crossword, keeps the lawn cut, and finds reasons to be out of the house. Melissa Economy dresses Ruth in the beige cardigans of a woman who has decided not to be looked at, and Thomas Newman’s score stays away for such long stretches that when a few piano notes finally arrive they sound like somebody knocking. Wilkinson and Spacek barely raise their voices for the better part of an hour.
The kitchen argument that ends the quiet is the scene we have not been able to shake. Each of them says the thing about the other that has been true all along and that neither would have said while Frank was in the house, and it is over in a few minutes, with a slap and a door. We sat quite still. We did not want to look at the person next to us. Field and Festinger write it with an accuracy about long marriages we did not expect from a first film, and Spacek plays it with her jaw, Wilkinson with his hands.
Then comes the turn. The last half hour moves toward something closer to a thriller, and most critics either forgive it or admire it. We believed every second of the grief and rather less of what the grief leads to. Field films the new material with the same stillness as the old, which is the right instinct, and Wilkinson is as good in it as anywhere, but the plot asks these people to do things the first ninety minutes have taught us they would not, and it leans on chance in a way the earlier film never does. Some critics found the whole thing slow. We did not; the length never troubled us.
Marisa Tomei deserves more than the tagline gives her. The older woman of the poster is a tired mother of two who likes a kind young man and knows exactly what the town thinks, and Tomei plays her without a trace of temptress. Karen Allen turns up as Marla Keyes and does more with a handful of scenes than the writing asks of her.
Watch it with somebody you have been with for a long time, and do not discuss it until morning. Neither of you will want to.
