In the Bedroom

Essay: IN THE BEDROOM Literature and Language Level: Undergraduate October 8th, 2010 IN THE BEDROOM The film In the Bedroom is a story of love, grief, hopelessness, anger and revenge. As the title goes In the Bedroom, refers to a small compartment known as Bedroom which is being used for lobster trap. The main characters include Matt, a town doctor who is fond of fishing and his wife Ruth, a music teacher at a school, their only son Frank, who studies architecture in a college and is home after his first year. There he falls in love with a lady named Natalie, a separated mother of two kids but yet not divorced from her husband Richard Strout. Richard can’t bear to see his wife with another man and soon he kills Frank during an argument at Nitalie’s home. Later, taking revenge from Richard becomes inevitable for the parents of Frank. As the film was based on a short story taken from the novel of Andre Dubus but the whole drama and characters were so well defined that it goes beyond the short story. Many of the events do not occur in the short story like Frank and Netalie running through the fields, the family picnic, the baseball game etc. Although the story is based upon different stages of grief and revenge by killing but the director filmed it in a way that interest goes to the stimuli and effects of the killing on survivors. The director Todd Field portrayed the movie in such details which shows coloring the world around, how one can intensify the grief and pain. Many of the scenes symbolize how Frank’s parents deal with pain including the one where Ruth takes out the food from refrigerator which smells foul, but still instead of throwing out she put it back unconsciously. Field tried to show that painful feelings can destroy but one should live with the knowledge that he has to survive and life does not end at the separation of our dear ones. Being a moving and powerful emotional drama, In the Bedroom is truthful in every detail, attention and steady development of characters takes it beyond the real story which counts towards the beauty of the film. There are some specific differences in the short story and the movie. The most obvious difference is of organization and relationship of the events in the movie. Events were organized in chronological order in the short story while in the film there were gaps in time between transitions of the scenes. There were found significant differences in the kidnapping and murder of the ...