The Door in the Floor

This movie has so much going for it, mostly in the acting department, that it’s a shame that it really doesn’t amount to much in the end. A couple has lost two sons in some sort of accident, and their marriage is coming apart. They’ve had another child, a girl of 4, but the mom (Kim Basinger) is too deep in her grief to have bonded with her. Her husband is Jeff Bridges, and he’s a writer of children’s books, and a real bastard. He hires a student who hopes to learn about writing but ends up just driving the guy all over town for his sexual affairs. The kid looks very much like one of the dead sons, and he has his own affair with the wife. And then the story of the horrible accident is revealed, and it just doesn’t measure up. The film is based on the first third of a book by John Irving, and the rest of the book apparently is about the little girl, so I don’t quite know why this bit was carved out and made into a movie.