Irving's clever film holds together until the end

With the success of "The World According to Garp" (1982), "Hotel New Hampshire" (1984), "Simon Birch" (1998) and "The Cider House Rules" (1999), John Irving has proven to be one of those rare contemporary, non-genre authors whose novels are unusually well suited for the movies.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR

DIRECTOR: Tod Williams

CAST: Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster

RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes

RATING: R for strong sexuality and graphic images

GRADE: B

- Photo gallery

"The Door in the Floor," a film version of Irving's "A Widow for One Year," is writer-director Tod Williams' attempt to expand this winning streak to five-for-five in three decades with the most sexually explicit cinematic rendering of Irving's world to date.

For most of its running time, it's not half bad, either. It works as a fascinating and often very funny character study/satire of a famous author, though it loses interest the harder it tries to be profound and falls apart completely toward the end.

This is the story of Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a successful children's book author whose earning from a best seller called "The Door in the Floor" have bought him a good life on a seaside estate in the trendy, luxurious alcove of East Hampton, New York.

But though he and his longtime wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), have had a successful marriage and a beautiful new daughter (Elle Fanning), they're haunted by a recent, unnamed-until-the-end-of-the-movie tragedy involving their two teenage sons.

We view the couple largely through the eyes of Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), an earnest and aspiring author who attended the same prep school as the late Cole boys and has come to the Cole estate to spend the summer as Ted's literary apprentice.

But the couple have just decided to separate, Ted turns out to be something of a buffoon who's knee-deep in a sordid affair with a neighbor (Mimi Rogers) and the young man falls into a lusty affair with Marion, who has otherwise been left dysfunctional by the tragedy of her sons.

So the movie pulls us into what has become the vacuous life of the celebrated couple, poking our prurient interest here and there with full nudity and steamy sex scenes and teasing us with little pieces of evidence as to what exactly the tragedy was that's now eating up their lives.

When the answer comes, it's gruesome but no surprise at all. Since the movie is basically structured toward its eventual revelation, it leaves us with a sense of emotional letdown and a pessimistic moral: Bad things happen to good people and make them the worse for it.

The movie is actually much more effective in its calmer moments, when it's being funny or wryly satiric or just skeptical of its setting: a smug, privileged corner of America that could hardly be more artistically sterile or cut off from the real world.

Director Williams gives his actors a great deal of rope and the performances are unique and strong: Foster is letter perfect as the happily corrupted young man; Basinger is a vision of post-traumatic stress, and Bridges is all self-deluded Rabelaisian gusto.

What comes through best of all is Irving's ambivalence toward the main character, and presumably, toward himself. The film can't decide if Ted Cole is a genuine artist or a blustery fraud, and this unresolved duality gives "Door in the Floor" just the right wistful edge.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.