Popular Culture Review
74
(a diary, an unpublished manuscript, and her own text-in-progress), finds her
way both into a new genre and back to herself. She succeeds by creating a
narrative in which, as reviewer Michael Rechtshaffen writes, the “line between
reality and fantasy becomes increasingly smudged"; in fact, the line between her
own life and the lives of her characters is blurred as well.
Drawn from a 1998 novel by John Irving entitled A Widow for One
Year, The Door in the Floor deals with Ted and Marion Cole (Kim Basinger),
who are dismantling their marriage after losing both their sons in a car accident
five years before. A.O. Scott argues in the New York Times (July 14, 2004) that
The Door in the Floor “may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that
are better than the books on which they are based/’ (Two other Irving novels
became successful films: The World According to Garp [1983] and The Cider
House Rules [1999].) Separated and trading residences in East Hampton in order
to be available to their four-year-old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning), the Coles
employ storytelling as a way to make meaning out of their shattered lives and as
a way to keep the memory of their sons Thomas and Timothy alive. (In the
novel, Marion Cole is also a writer, and Ruth later becomes one.)
A bright and articulate child, Ruth has become a receptacle for her
parents’ stories, and she obsessively tells and retells the stories of her brothers to
those who will listen and demands that her parents chronicle the events captured
in the family photographs that adorn the house. Scott writes, “Rather than help
her parents move beyond their grief she traps them inside it, and herself as
well.” Some of the most powerful moments in the film are of Ruth as she stands
on a chair in a darkened hallway, looking at the framed photographs of young
men who died before she was bom and whispering their stories to herself.
Becoming anxious if the photographs are moved or taken down, Ruth seems to
realize that possessing the images and their respective narratives is a way to hold
onto her dissolving family.
The photographs that decorate the hallways and bedrooms in the film
are decontextualized by the child as she struggles to understand what happened
to her brothers. Thomas and Timothy seem alive and energized in the
photographs, but they are absent in real life and real time. The contrast terrifies
Ruth, making her cry out on more than one occasion and ask if she, too, is going
to die. (Ruth, for example, drops one of the framed photographs and cuts her
finger. As the doctor puts stitches in, she asks, “Am I going to die?” The answer,
of course, is “No": The wound will heal. But the answer is also “Yes”: Like her
brothers, she, too, will one day die.)
Overhearing one conversation between Ted Cole and Ruth, we learn
how the boundaries between life and death have become confused for the child.
We recognize the photographs and literature as her way to preserve the past.
Ruth asks her father about her brothers in an effort to understand where they
have gone:
Ru t h :
Te d :
‘D ead ’ m eans th e y ’re broken?
Well, their bodies are broken. Yes.