I didn’t like The Room Next Door immediately, in fact I thought it was as flat as a pancake. However, I loved the performances, particularly Julianne Moore who had much more to do than Tilda. The Golden Globes made a mysterious choice by nominating Tilda as she simply had to look stoic and sickly without much range.
Death has been a fixation of mind in the last month. First I read What Are You Going Through of which Pedro Almodovar based this film, then I read Sigrid Nunez’s biography of Susan Sontag, upon which the aforementioned novel is based which has a lot to do with Susan’s end stages of cancer. I followed all that up with Getting to Know Death by Gail Godwin which morbidly deals with her breaking her neck at 85, even more morbid that I was told four years ago in the ER that while I didn’t have any internal bleeding (due to a clumsy hitting my head on a soap dish), that my neck bones didn’t look so good. And since Novemberish, except for a few weeks of relief around the holidays, my neck hasn’t, to use the ER’s words, felt ‘so great’. But I digress…
The film’s positive attributes are Julianne’s performance and John Turturro’s. The BIG weakness is the screenplay. Since Sigrid had given up her rights to the book, Pedro could have done anything.
So, putting my stethoscope on, let me script doctor this devil:
What’s already here: The two women remember back when Julianne ‘stole’ John Turturro away and Tilda reveals he was the best sex she ever had. And lo and behold, he’s doing a book talk in the twon where Tilda is convalescing.
OK, so Pedro, what you do is, have JT give her one last roll in the hay (to be blunt) and have Julianne grapple with her mixed feelings of jealousy and admiration. Now you’ve added at least two or three layers of emotionality. Call me next time you get to a screenwriting finalization.
Since I walked out feeling Julianne’s presence into the next day, and now that I’ve had 5 more days to sit with the film, I do think it’s worth seeing. Euthanasia is relevant as were the fine performances.
