The Room Next Door

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore

Few recent films have engendered such a divided response in me as Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door. This adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through is a tale of decades long friendship that is rekindled when one of the protagonists must face her mortality. Martha (Tilda Swinton), a writer and war correspondent, has received a terminal cancer diagnosis in New York city. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a successful writer who has not kept up with her friend, hears of Martha's plight from a mutual confidante at a book signing and endeavors to make up for lost time by providing Martha with support. However, she gets more than she bargained for when Martha enlists her as her companion on an upstate retreat where Martha intends to commit suicide.

This dolorous narrative is broken up by flashbacks that show the fate of Martha's Vietnam era love, Fred (Alex Høgh Andersen). Fred is the father of Martha's estranged daughter, Michelle, but was too broken by his experiences in the war to be a true father. The flashback sequences, like the rest of the film, look great even when offering the hoariest of cliches. Fred gets a Viking funeral when he plunges into a burning building and does not return. He hears terrified cries from the burning edifice, which is empty, because of his wartime trauma; he is still in Saigon as Charlie Daniels sang. An overwrought episode that is further bungled by Almodóvar who can only direct action as farce. Victoria Luengo's slip that allows Fred to go unimpeded to his doom has to be one of the most feeble stunts of recent memory. Something a streaming police show hack could dash off. 

There is also a brief flashback of Martha's memories of a wartime posting that is more up Pedro's alley. Ingrid is given little back story, in contrast. The pity is that Moore gives the better performance. Swinton is well cast as Martha, she has always looked half dead to me, but can't quite muster the swagger of a writer who has heretofore dodged death. John Turturro is adequate as former lover of both women. However, the characters are under nourished culture vultures. The film is replete with the name dropping hip New Yorker's have been prone to since the days of Horace Greeley: Dora Carrington, Edward Hopper, Martha Gelhorn, etc. The milieu is similar to that of Woody Allen film, for good and ill.  

However, as a play of light, color, and shade, The Room Next Door succeeds. Even as the plot devolves into an Afternoon School Special trumpeting euthanasia as the bee's knees, the director unleashes a host of gorgeous images that urge us to seize the day, stop and smell the roses, and breathe. The reflection on Martha's picture windows, be they downtown or upstate, become Almodóvar's principle means of picturing an affirmation of human and natural beauty. The labor expended so that Martha's balcony, a fifties style diorama, can conjure the right pink tone of sunset tells one where Almodóvar's artistic affinities lie. Comparable to David Hockney, Almodóvar fills the screen with light and eschews chiaroscuro. Even Swinton's death head is kissed by the sun. This aesthetic effect causes The Room Next Door to feel a little too chi-chi at times. Swinton's hospital suite is truly to die for, but it is proof that Pedro Almodóvar is still kicking.