Illustration by Michael DiMilo
A Friend in Need: Review of The Room Next Door
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
Film, like painting, is mostly–but arguably–a surface medium. While voiceovers and internal dialogues might allow audiences access to a character’s thoughts or intentions (think Sin City, Taxi Driver, or A Clockwork Orange), the audience is mostly constrained—as we are in real life—to surmising a person’s feelings, thoughts, and intents from the external, either their actions or their speech. And it seems obvious that dialogue is a far more subtle way to determine the interior life of a screen character.
Annie Hall is a film that simultaneously reveals the funny and bittersweet edges of love through its snappy dialogue (and a brilliantly funny sequence of inner monologues displayed as subtitles during the first meeting between the two main characters). The razor-sharp dialogue in Juno underlines the main character’s quirky intelligence and worldview while simultaneously showing her vulnerability—and her courage.
Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre is a film about two friends having dinner and talking about life, culture, and philosophy. It is a brilliant example of how dialogue can not only reveal character but can also focus sharply on the sensibilities and textures of life experience; in short, the conversation transcends the subject—it becomes the subject.
One might expect a film about two friends entering a life and death pact to contain mostly scintillating and brilliant dialogue, but The Room Next Door relies on a different sort of sensibility to reveal the depths and resonances of its characters.
Ingrid (Julianna Moore), an accomplished author, is at a book signing featuring her latest work when she runs into an old friend who tells her that their mutual friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) has cancer. Ingrid goes to visit her friend at the hospital and learns that she has stage three cervical cancer. Martha describes—in great detail—her estrangement from her daughter Michelle (Swinton) and ends up telling Ingrid the story of the girl’s father (a damaged Vietnam vet) and Michelle’s conception. She also tells Ingrid of her experience as a war correspondent, especially of meeting some Carmelites immediately preceding the evacuation of Baghdad. Despite not having seen each for years, the two grow close. Ingrid visits Martha at her home more and more frequently.
Then, suddenly one afternoon, Martha tells Ingrid that she has decided to stop her cancer treatments. She (rather dramatically) explains how she procured a euthanasia pill from somewhere on the dark web and plans to end her life when and where she wants. She asks Ingrid to be with her—in the room next door—when she finally decides to end it all.
Initially conflicted and freaked out because, as she tells Martha at some length, she is terrified of death—Ingrid finally agrees. Martha rents a beautiful home near Woodstock and the two go there to fulfill Martha’s final wishes. Situated on a wooded mountainside, the idyllic location is a paradise. Birdsong fills the rosy dawns and the home itself is beautifully decorated.
In fact, the entire production design of The Room Next Door, interior and exterior, is sumptuous. Martha’s Manhattan apartment (God knows what it would cost) with its beautiful terrace and impeccably decorated interior, is fantastic. In fact, the entire screen is splashed with brilliant colors and objets d’art, a reflection of the friends’ sophistication and appreciation of the finer things. Director Pedro Almodovar places bowls of fruit (still lifes?) that populate every counter. When Martha and Ingrid spot an Edward Hopper painting at their Woodstock rental, Ingrid comments that it must be a copy, that the owners wouldn’t have left an original there. Their world is an elegant place, and their lives are filled with love and beauty.
As part of their deal, Martha tells Ingrid that she will not have to see her die, that when she decides to go, she will close the door to her room. Each morning, filled with dread, Ingrid climbs the stairs until she catches sight of Martha’s door.
Before she became ill, Martha was a war correspondent, and Ingrid is a bestselling author. They are portrayed as accomplished, intelligent, and independent women. That much is apparent from the production design, the acting, and the backstory. What is surprising—and fascinating—is the disarming honesty of the dialogue. A viewer would usually expect women at this level of sophistication and intelligence to engage in conversations that contains a fair amount sophisms and irony, but the talks between Ingrid and Martha—and other characters—are unexpectedly honest and straightforward, as if the conversations have been deliberately stripped of all pretenses. As Alissa Wilkinson avers in her New York Times review, these women do not have to pretend they’re someone they’re not.
While this sort of dialogue allows the viewer a straight-line view into the characters’ hearts, at times it creates a clunky and wooden impression. I couldn’t help wondering “who talks like this” as I watched the movie, but this sense of unreality lays the foundation for what comes after.
As the days pass, Ingrid becomes more and more stressed, waking every morning to see whether Martha’s door is open or shut. As the two spend more and more time together watching Buster Keaton movies and then a film version of the James Joyce story, “The Dead”. As the final scene unfolds, and the narrator is speaking of the snow covering all of Ireland, we see Ingrid mouthing the last paragraph of the story: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” This is a succinct realization that mortality is inevitable, that death will fall and cover everyone. Indeed, there are several occasions in the film when snow falls unexpectedly, when mortality blankets the knowledge of the two women.
As the end nears, the tone of the film changes in a very subtle, almost imperceptible way. Suddenly, the friendship based on mutual love, respect, and support becomes representative of life itself. The beautiful mise-en-scene of The Room Next Door symbolizes the moment in life when Martha wants to leave, a moment of friendship and beauty, not of pain, grief, and fear. It’s been a quality life, and she wants to keep it—even the conclusion of it—that way.
Tilda Swinton is nothing short of brilliant in this film. She gives a subtle, nuanced, yet straightforward, almost blunt performance. Her Martha is tough, resilient, self-reliant, smart, supportive, and a little selfish. Her almost journalistic honesty while describing her failing faculties to Ingrid is touching.
Julianne Moore is as equally brilliant as Ingrid. She conquers her apprehension, frustration, and fear of death to help her friend. It is a finally nuanced performance that plays incredibly well off of Swinton’s performance. Their chemistry is palpable. As Damian, a former (though not simultaneous) lover of both Ingrid and Martha, John Turturro is the perfect foil to their positive view of mortality. He is a climate change doomsayer. In their final scene, Ingrid cannot fathom his pessimism.
The Room Next Door is not an ordinary film. It reaches for understandings about mortality, acceptance, giving, and forgiveness that—unlike some of the dialogue—is almost ethereal. It is a beautiful, full-hearted, and sometimes puzzling movie, but it is definitely worth seeing.