The movies keep giving us grief. Four releases in the last month have dealt with mourning and loss — The Mothman Prophecies, Collateral Damage, Dragonfly, and now Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room. The many Oscar nominations for last year’s In the Bedroom crown the surfeit of consoling cinema that’s been serendipitously available post–September 11.
Of these releases, Moretti’s film, which won the Palme d’Or last year at Cannes, might be the most thoughtful and the least satisfying. Like In the Bedroom, it confronts the subject realistically, but it doesn’t submit to that film’s solution of easy catharsis. Instead, Moretti examines with mostly detached and unsentimental lucidity the anguish and impulses, the violation and the healing, of the suddenly bereft.
As such it’s a drastic departure for this director, whose two films released here, the memoiristic documentaries Caro diario (1994) and Aprile (1998), have earned him the misnomer "the Italian Woody Allen." Uneven rambles from whimsy to would-be social commentary, from self-indulgence to self-depreciation to self-righteousness, those two efforts are barely redeemed by winsome irony.
Not so Room, a fictional feature austerely written and directed and free of the whimsies. Moretti himself stars (as he does in all his films) as Giovanni, an oppressively well-adjusted psychotherapist and family man. Wife Paola (Laura Morante) is gorgeous and wise; daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) is athletic and level-headed; son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice) is bright and spirited. The patients are another matter — a suicidal depressive, a violent sex addict, an obsessive-compulsive, etc. Giovanni helps them beat their heads against the walls of their mental prisons. Although ineffectual, he’s respected and well paid.
Cracks appear in the blithe surface. The school suspects Andrea of stealing a fossil from its collection, but he’s cleared. Uneasiness lingers. It’s the depressive whose call alters Giovanni’s plan to take a Saturday-morning jog with Andrea. The doctor dutifully makes a house call (HMOs apparently haven’t caught up with Italy yet) to calm the man’s jitters, Andrea takes off on his scuba-diving expedition, and then the darkness falls. Doctor, heal thyself — it’s one thing to listen patiently to the hopeless woes of others, but how do you find clarity when the victim is yourself?
There are no answers, and neither does Moretti offer any — certainly none of the near-platitudes his character cooks up for his clients. But the details here are as inevitable and precise as the bolts and the solder that seal the dead boy’s coffin in one of the film’s mutely eloquent moments. The seven stages of grief may be a pop-psychology cliché, but here they resound with terrible validity. The death poisons everything, as Giovanni makes all the mistakes he would counsel his patients against in dealing with it, blaming himself for not taking that jog with Andrea and maybe altering his fate, blaming the hapless patient for dragging him away, blaming a small rubber plug in the diving equipment that might have been defective. Awareness of his folly, though, only makes a mockery of the suffering, and it chips away at his practice, his marriage, and his family.
Perhaps too literally. The film doesn’t need to smash crockery to make its point. Also iffy is the love letter Andrea receives posthumously; it prompts Paola to make a desperate, half-understood attempt to bring her boy back to life, if only vicariously. Ignoring Giovanni’s embittered, almost contemptuous advice, Paola calls the girl, a brief summer romance, and repels her with her own need. Morante brilliantly portrays Paola’s compulsion as both predatory and pathetic, but her performance doesn’t erase the suspicion that this is one plot twist that’s going to end with hugs all around.
Sometimes hugs get the job done, however, especially if they are accompanied by a recognition of the sadness, fear, and mystery they seek to embrace. In his rendition of this universal tragedy, Moretti quietly drops enigmas that are both inconsequential and resonant, that answer nothing but question everything. Why was the fossil stolen? What was Andrea looking for in that underwater cave? Why does Giovanni buy Brian Eno’s soothing and sinister "Down by the River" to commemorate Andrea and then never play it? And what of the son’s room itself? Such mysteries might not provide hope or restitution, but like the long ride through the tunnel that concludes the film, they do open to beauty.
