I’ve had the 2004 film The Door in the Floor on my DVR for months and months after recording it off a cable channel one night. I kept forgetting about it until recently when I was going through the machine deleting old files in an effort to clear some space for the upcoming football season. I decided to watch the movie, but turned it off after 15 excruciating minutes of what seemed like utter garbage. After checking out some generally positive reviews from professional critics, I thought I should watch the whole thing. Perhaps it would get better before the end. It didn’t.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Jeff Bridges stars as Ted Cole, a successful children’s author and illustrator whose marriage has been disintegrating for years. He and his wife Marion (played by Kim Basinger) are in a trial separation for the summer, with each taking turns residing in their beach house and their house in town. Caught in the middle is their four-year-old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning), who will likely be the object of a future custody battle.

It soon becomes evident that Ted derives some sadistic pleasure from psychologically tormenting his wife. In addition to openly sleeping around with other women from town, Ted hires a 16-year-old Exeter student named Eddie (Jon Foster) to be his assistant for the summer. It’s later revealed that Ted specifically chose Eddie for two reasons: A) because Eddie looks a lot like one of Ted and Marion’s deceased sons; and B) because Ted wants Eddie to sleep with Marion.

If you think this sounds twisted, it is. There are no mitigating factors to speak of, and nearly every character in the film, save for the little girl, is reprehensible and unlikable. The rest of the movie just continues to chronicle their sick melodrama as it plays out through the remainder of the summer.

My Reaction: I know that The Door in the Floor was an adaptation from part of a John Irving novel (A Widow for One Year), but I’m not familiar with that work, so can only tell you what I thought of the film as a standalone work. Basically, I felt it was pretentious and ultimately pointless. Yes, I understand that we’re supposed to see how Ted and Marion deal with grief and how each one has to work through their feelings in whatever way they can. I get it. Not everyone deals with tragedy the same way, yada, yada, yada. Even knowing that, this film still felt incredibly empty and shallow, with no real resolution and, again, no point.

I also have to say that I strongly objected to the rather graphic sex scenes between Marion and Eddie. I am not a prude or anything like that, and I’ve come to expect sex scenes that really push the envelope towards an NC-17 rating these days. But the scenes in this movie were doubly disturbing because I was essentially watching statutory rape. I don’t remember when this movie was in wide release… was there any outrage over these scenes? There should have been. I can only imagine what people would have said if the scenes had depicted a 40-something man and a 16-year-old girl. Why shouldn’t we feel equally disgusted by an older woman and an underage boy?

Overall, I feel The Door in the Floor was a complete waste of time. I guess some people might find this sort of story appealing, but I’m not one of them. I give the movie 1 stars out of 5, and am kicking myself for not following my first instinct to abandon the whole thing after 15 minutes.