46/13
Featured in The 7PM Project: Episode dated 8 September 2024 (2024)
Plot
Ingrid and Martha were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine. After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.. Pedro Almodóvar's first long feature film in English..
The answer, alas: it's disappointing
I was curious to see what Pedro Almodóvar would do differently in his first non-Spanish-language film, built around two of the most talented actors working today. There are many ways in which "The Room Next Door" lacks what makes Almodóvar's work so distinctive – the spontaneity, the sense of improvisation, the comic timing, the fizzy ensemble work — but this film's main fault, as I see it, is that it's just plain overwritten, something that is rare in his previous work.The screenplay (which he is credited with writing) was adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez that I have not read, but it sounds like vast swatches of the dialogue were lifted verbatim from it, with much that is ponderous and stilted, slowing down and emptying the film, where Almodóvar's work is usually characterized by lapidary dialogues and madcap forward movement, plunging you into the characters' world with little exposition – as a viewer, you are kind of just there, hanging on for dear life, and figuring out relationships and social context as you go, grabbing at what you can. Even in films that deal with dark subjects ("Pain and Glory" or "Bad Education" come to mind), the action and its background unfold in convincing ways (even when these are actually crazy if you stop and think about them) that draw on our intuition and empathy and depend only marginally on extended expository narration.Here, it is the opposite: the characters talk and explain on and on, with a few awkward flashbacks to establish context.
Little is left to our imaginations
So, while some of the usual Almodóvarian hallmarks are there, particularly in the exquisite use of saturated, cunningly coordinated color and in the tastefulness of many of the sets and costumes (here with lots of lovely still lifes of flowers and fruits), these are reduced to props – they don't serve to tell the story and overwhelm you into accepting the reality of his crazily artificial visual worlds in the way they do in most of his films. And the computer-generated backdrops of New York feel completely artificial and thus become meaningless. Almodóvar's films certainly have plots, often quite convoluted (which is part of the fun), but they don't feel plot-driven, even when they are.
But the wordiness of this screenplay undermines Swinton, in particular
"The Room Next Door", on the other hand, is all about its plot, and it is the weaker for it.With talents like Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (plus the estimable John Turturro) in front of the camera, there have to be, and are, some great, often very moving, moments – how could there not be, especially given the plot's central premise and the way it both reinforces and strains a longstanding , close friendship in its final days? Her awesome strength lies in her powerful, enigmatic presence and in her understatement. In my unscientific assay, she speaks as much dialogue here as she has done in at least the last three or four of her films (the ones I've seen, that is) combined.
The relationship between the two is subtle, shifting, complex, rich and involving – and yet so little of that is based on explicit dialogue
Think of her stunning performances in another fairly recent film about the fraught relationship between two women, "The Eternal Daughter" (2022), in which she plays, devastatingly, both an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter.