Archivio di news mensili riguardanti la vita privata di Kim, i film in uscita, le classifiche, le apparizioni tv.

1 luglio: CELLULAR Movie Poster!!!

	2 luglio: Win tickets to see 'Door in the Floor' on July 13 - Want to see a special advance screening of "The Door in the Floor" at 7:30 p.m. July 13 at the Uptown Birmingham 8? Adapted from John Irving's best-selling novel "A Widow for One Year," it stars Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger and examines a marriage strained by tragedy. The film is rated R, so no entrants under age 18, please. To enter to win one of 50 passes for two, e-mail your name, postal address and daytime phone to mailto:moviecontest@hotmail.com  Type "Door" in the subject field.
	3 luglio: Kim Basinger Romps With Teenager in Latest Film - Hollywood star Kim Basinger shares steamy love scenes with a 16-year-old boy in her latest movie. The Oscar-winning beauty, 50, appears in a series of sex scenes with the teenager in The Door In The Floor - where she plays a mother grieving the loss of her two teenage sons who falls for her husband's adolescent assistant, played by Jon Foster. Director Tod Williams says, "She was fearless during the nude scenes. She was scared of the darkness of this role, but because it scared her, she did it." Twice-married Basinger says of her character's love affair, "I don't think I can see myself going out with a teenager as happened in the film. Still, love comes in strange packages."
	4 luglio: Old? Yes. But we like to watch - You know what's missing from the summer movie ads? Me. In the ubiquitous cacophony that are the commercials for The Chronicles of Riddick or Around the World in 80 Days or Spider-Man 2, I see quick cuts and hear a lot of f/x noise, but nothing that makes me want to haul my heiny off the sofa and go. And that's a big too bad for Hollywood, because according to Variety, I am actually a decade younger than the fastest-growing movie-going demographic these days, the over-50s. Surprised to hear that? I was. Sifting through the summer movie posters, you would think we all lived in that Star Trek episode where grumps who hit 30 are summarily killed. (Wait - they do live like that in L.A. Hence all the Botox.)  But while overall movie ticket sales were down 4 per cent in the United States and 5 per cent overseas last year, ticket sales for those aged 50-to-dead were up a startling 20 per cent. You would think sheer venality (Hollywood's specialty) would mean that every studio would assign some smart-aleck whippersnapper Wharton grad in its marketing department to the gray beat, but no. They're still focused on courting our kids, even though - what with the cellphone camera thingies and the i-pod doodads and the video-game-box whatzes with which today's teens distract themselves - the studios had to spend 28 per cent more on advertising in 2003 than they did in 2002, which was already twenty-something per cent more than they spent in 2001, and so on. The baby-boom generation, accustomed to getting plenty of what it wants, has begun to make some noise, however. The American Association of Retired Persons has started awarding an annual "Movies for Grownups" trophy, called La Chaise d'Or. (Ooh my, we may be old but we sure are a hoot!) Last year's winners were Mystic River and A Mighty Wind, two movies that starred people in their 40s, but were nonetheless perfect for AARP's constituents because they're both about memory, about reaching backward to figure out how the hell you got here. As well, the runaway success of a film like Something's Gotta Give always sends a few studio heads scrambling to ape it. So it's not all Dodgeball and White Chicks this summer.  There's lots of promising grown-up fare: De-Lovely, the Cole Porter biopic starring Kevin Kline; The Door in the Floor, about a crisis in a long marriage, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger - who both look as absurdly beautiful with wrinkles as they did without them; The Manchurian Candidate remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, both in full-throttle, intense-crazy mode; The Clearing, a kidnap thriller in which Willem Dafoe and Robert Redford go mano-a-mano (or wattle-a-wattle); and Shall We Dance? in which Richard Gere dispels middle-aged torpor by taking dance lessons from Jennifer Lopez. These are films that could actually satisfy adults without condescending to them, unlike, say, The Notebook, which is lovely in its flashbacks but so spectacularly icky in its present day nursing-home scenes that fiftysomethings may run screaming from the theatre, never to return.  The thing that Hollywood is overlooking is that any film with any intelligence whatsoever behind it could be marketed to adults. Fiftysomethings would be just as willing to see I, Robot, the Will Smith thriller; or King Arthur's sexy knights; or Halle Berry in Catwoman (in his 50s, my dear old dad was crazy for Julie Newmar as Catwoman on the Batman TV show); or Tom Cruise as a bad guy in Collateral. I'm sure they'd line up for The Village, the newest M. Night Shyamalan spookfest, even though the commercials play up its younger stars Joaquin Phoenix and Adrien Brody, and hide its oldsters William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver in the shadows. Even though fiftysomethings may be a bit paunchier than the stars of A Home at the End of the World (Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn), Before Sunset (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy), or We Don't Live Here Anymore (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern, and Peter Krause and Naomi Watts), they can still relate to those films' themes of love damaged and lost. The marketing machine, you see, is too squeamish to admit that it wants the AARP and its ilk. Those Hollywood honchos are as terrified of tainting their movies with the stale smell of old folks as they are of aging themselves. They think that if the oldsters are going, the youngsters won't want to, and kids aged 16 to 20 are still the most frequent filmgoers, averaging more than one movie a month. But the marketers are missing the boat, if you ask me. They're the ones with the old-fogey ideas. This is the youngest generation of fifty and sixtysomethings in history -- the most open, the most experienced, the most unshockable, the most interested. This is the generation that's flocking to documentaries, making them box-office powerhouses for the first time. This is the generation that wants to hear the truth about Cole Porter's double life; that admits freely that fidelity can be a bitch. This is the generation that grew up believing that movies were more than entertainment, they were art; that believed that a Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider, a Bonnie and Clyde or French import could change the world; that still holds out hope every time they buy a ticket that they'll see something ambitious. There's a golden opportunity here, if only some hungry honcho would seize it. Instead of marketing Saved as a teen movie, pitch it to parents, to whom its gently subversive humour would really appeal. Instead of marketing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a Jim Carrey movie, sell it as what it is: a delicate vehicle about how memory is all we are. Send out The Bourne Supremacy not as a Matt Damon blockbuster for kids, but as an intelligent thriller for anyone who's literate enough to have read the novels upon which it's based. Why not run one commercial on MTV that focuses on a film's pounding soundtrack, and another on CBS that delivers its meat? Why not peddle the upcoming The Thunderbirds, starring Ben Kingsley, as both a kids' movie and a movie for people mature enough to have watched the puppet show as kids themselves?  Surely there's enough in the marketing budget of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, to sell it not only to the frat boys who worship its star, Will Ferrell, but also to the folks who were actually sentient in the 1970s, in which it's set. Fiftysomethings have two things movie audiences need - time and cash. And they, more than anyone, know the value of a little attentive wooing.
	5 luglio: Can Your Bare It? - Skin is in for some of Hollywood's top stars, but plenty of others say enough to being in the buff. "Extra" uncovers the naked truth about stripping down. Chloe Sevigny's going graphic with an X-rated sex scene in her upcoming film "The Brown Bunny," and Kim Basinger will bare it all in "The Door in the Floor." And currently at the movies, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams can't seem to keep their clothes on in "The Notebook," so much that Ryan claims, "I've never been this naked in my life."  But while some actors say, "Yes" to nude scenes, others say, "No way."  "Curb Your Enthusiasm's" Cheryl Hines says no to nude, joking to us that, "I wouldn't go topless just because I've got good ones." 19-year-old Scarlett Johansson also draws the line at losing her clothes. And while Carrie's three best friends were known to go topless on "Sex and the City," Sarah Jessica Parker had a no nudity clause in her contract.  But while McAdams confirms that her role in "The Notebook" features, "Some exposure. Some flesh," she insists the love scenes needed the nudity. "It had to be romantic and sensual and sexual." And if you looked like 50-year-old Kim Basinger, how hard could those sensual nude scenes be? "They're never easy," Basinger said of exposing her skin, and admitted, "We all have our good days and bad days. Some days I look in the mirror and go, 'You know, you look okay today,' and most other days, it's, 'God, you look horrible.'"  But some guys, such as "ER's" Mekhi Phifer, don't seem to have days like that. "I have no problem doing it for film," he insisted. "I have a movie coming out with Ray Liotta called 'Slow Burn' where I am nude." Going naked is also no big deal for 54-year-old Jeff Bridges, as we will see in "The Door in the Floor." But "The Notebook's" Gosling admitted that he was nervous about being up on the big screen in his birthday suit: "You're getting naked and making love and then your mother can go see. That's terrible."

	6 luglio: Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger Talk About "The Door in the Floor" - Adapted from the best-selling John Irving novel, "A Widow for One Year," "The Door in the Floor" is a complex tale of love and relationships. "It's about how love is defined by its shadow - loss," explains writer/director Tod Williams. Jeff Bridges feels it's "a wonderful combination of tragedy and comedy," while producer Ted Hope sees the film as being all about "the complexities of life."  What does author John Irving think about this big screen adaptation? "Tod Williams' screenplay is the most word-for-word faithful translation to film of any of the adaptations written from my novels. But he has also made his own film. This is excellent work," proclaims Irving. The story follows one summer in the life of children's book author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and his wife Marion (Kim Basinger). With their marriage in shambles after a devastating tragedy, a young man ignites a spark in Marion, and the Coles find themselves faced with having to make difficult choices about the future of their family. INTERVIEW WITH KIM BASINGER AND JEFF BRIDGES: Why are older woman/younger man relationships so controversial? KIM BASINGER: I don't know. I don't care. I enjoyed every minute of it. I think that love and sex and everything comes in all different ways and sizes in life. I've just more or less always had a European attitude about things, I think, a looseness. I think that my life, I've been so attracted to the “Harold and Maude” aspect of living as opposed to the norm. Normal is so boring. I like to spice it up a little myself. Were you familiar with the book this movie’s based on? KIM BASINGER: No. Of course I knew about it, but no. I was really introduced to it by the script, which was really wonderful for ‘Marion.’ It was really great. Was that what attracted you to the project? KIM BASINGER: The script, and I loved Marion. I loved Marion's - and this is my word that I'm using - her ‘aloneness.’ I loved Kip [director Tod Williams]. I think that combination alone. I could not and would not have done this piece without Kip. I don't know. It was just a perfect time for me to meet Marion. She was rather quiet and got to be somewhat of a voyeur. That was kind of interesting for me, and sort of internal. Jeff, did you know the book? JEFF BRIDGES: I hadn't read the book, but I knew of it. My wife had read it. And I read it in preparation for the role. I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy that he manages to do. It's really terrific. Kip had such a great adaptation of it. That was a big plus for me when I'd heard that John was being supportive of it. He called Kip, or I guess that's he going officially as Tod, but I think that Tod bought the rights for $1 from John. How do you get into the mindset of parents who have lost children? KIM BASINGER: I think that the advantage that you have having had children, you don't have to think about it. If I had not had my daughter, I wouldn't know. That's true. That's honest. I don't think that you could be as convincing, even to yourself, about the truth that goes with that. As a parent, you just don't go there. You just don't go there. So as artists, when we had to go there, whatever we had we went there. It's something that we didn't even share. We just shared the moment on film, but we didn't even share it all. It's so a part of a parent’s horror, fear. JEFF BRIDGES: You don't even have to think about it. Hearing Kim speak about [it] and not even really talk about it, but I was thinking about when Beau [Bridges] did “Baker Boys.” If it was another actor, you'd probably spend a lot of energy trying to figure out, “How do we appear to be brothers? What can we do that will give the illusion of that?” Since we were actually brothers, you didn't need to talk about it. You had that in your kit bag and you didn't need to take it out. It's just there, and a similar thing is having children yourself. I didn't have to think about. It was just kind of there. I didn't have to bring it out too much, even to myself, in the work. One of the things that I did in preparation for that aspect of losing a child was talking to my mother who lost a child just before me. His name was Gary. My mom and dad went through Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A kid, a year old, and you go up to see the baby and the baby is dead. I talked to her about that, and how they worked through that, and how long it lasted, and it's still just like it happened yesterday if you talk to my mom. Kim, is there anything that could make you leave your kids - like this character? KIM BASINGER: Not me in my own life. But I totally understood why Marion did it. It is heartbreaking, especially to leave her, Elle. My gosh. Do you two notice any changes in each other since working together on “Nadine?” KIM BASINGER: Well, of course that was a comedy and this is different. Jeff is endearing in that I'll never forget this as long as I live: I'll never forget meeting Jeff the first time, and he was crazy about rehearsal. He wanted to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. He wanted to put the lines here. He wanted to draw out the whole thing with a piece of chalk. “This is the room. This is what we're going to do.” He [Jeff] refers to it as ‘peeling his onion.’ So I watched him peel that onion and peel that onion and peel that onion and I would then go up to Benton and go, “Is he finished peeling the onion? Can we get going?” On this film, he gave me that phrase upstairs.  He used it when he was talking a bunch. He was saying, “I like to sit and sit and peel and peel and be surprised and see what more, what more…” And after notebooks and notebooks of copious notes, days of pictures, he studied this character like you wouldn't believe. And I sit there fascinated just by the difference in the way we work, but it so compliments us. It just…it works. It just works. I used to go up to Kip and even Kip would be watching him open up and read and reassess and look, and I so admire that. But I don't know if it's my impatience, I don't know what it is, but I kind of just like the reactor part of acting. I think that it's just as important. It's like the listening part is just as important as the talking. I don't think - - I don't even know what method it is. I just go from my gut, from my heart.  JEFF BRIDGES: I think that our styles between the two pictures, they're basically the same. There wasn't any different way that I felt that you worked or I worked. I mean, my style is basically the same way that I approached it. I love what we came up with in “Nadine.” It's an illusion. It's like a magic trick that we're all trying to pull off together. It doesn't really matter how you do it, just so the illusion is there. And I remember first working with Kim. I was a little bit concerned and I was a younger actor, too. There are so many different ways to approach it and they're all just as valid as each other, and I was a little concerned that we weren't going to be connected. And when I saw the results, I thought that it was great. So when I saw that she was going to be on this, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be wonderful." We unfortunately don't have that many scenes together. We had maybe two scenes, and one of those is silent. But just being in the frame with her and having these kind of things going back and forth, unspoken things, it's wonderful. For me to watch it, I go, “Oh, we pulled that trick off. That was pretty good.” Personally, I like it. KIM BASINGER: I do, too. It's so funny working out the mechanics of where you come from, only to find out that you actually work identical. It's strange. Believe me, it's endearing what he does. I watch him do it, and I have confidence. I don't know. I'm just the opposite. I had the confidence that we would just meet exactly at the same place and we have in that way. This character has given up on her marriage. Could you be open to it again in the future? KIM BASINGER: In life, you mean? I don't know. No. I look at marriage and I think marriage is phenomenal. I think it's great. I don't hold anything against marriage. Who knows what is up the road? How about big love?  KIM BASINGER: Big love? What's big love? Big love again? Yeah! Anybody, I think, is open to [it] as long as love is real true, honest love, which is rare, but unconditional, wonderful love? Oh my God, I think anybody is. Kim, why does your character have the affair? KIM BASINGER: I've watched “Harold and Maude” too many times. I wanted to upgrade her one. You know what I found in him? I found we were on similar journeys. That's what I found. It was very funny. I found a friend. I found someone that I could let a little of me out and I wasn't looking for when to do that, really. I just stumbled upon it and the opportunity was there. And there were a lot of things going on in her mind too. Were you comfortable with the nude scene? KIM BASINGER: I was very comfortable with that scene. How did you make your co-star comfortable? KIM BASINGER: You know what? I couldn't have chosen a better partner for that. I've been through this many times and it's not ever easy or fun. A lot of things are choreographed and this, that and the other. Jon [Foster] and I walked the room with Kip and I just said, “Jon, let’s just do this thing. Come on.” It sort of happened in a natural fashion, too. I said, “It's just a scene. Just do whatever.” I'm so fond of him and so protective of him, which is just the opposite because usually I've worked with men, mostly men, who have been very protective of me. Here I found myself saying, '”kay, let me keep him here? So it was quite the reverse. It was interesting, but he was such a trooper and very free and lovely, just a lovely guy.
	7 luglio: Basinger Wanted To Kill Baldwin - Hollywood beauty Kim Basinger yearned to kill ex-husband Alec Baldwin during their vicious custody battle for daughter Ireland. The 50-year-old actress confesses she found it "nearly impossible" to forgive Baldwin and fantasized about his death during their violent battle for the eight-year- old when she was branded a "black widow spider" and "nutcase" for accusing the Beetlejuice star of drunken wife battery. Basinger admits, "Forgiveness is a hard thing to practice when the person keeps repeatedly doing what he's doing - sometimes you want to go out and kill somebody. It's a tragedy that there are so many divorces and messed-up family relationships, and that certain adults put their emotional illnesses on their children." The pair met while filming 1991 movie The Marrying Man and divorced two years ago but now have joint custody of their child.
	8 luglio: Basinger proud how she handled breakup . Kim Basinger says she is not prepared to enter a new relationship following her divorce from Alec Baldwin. The actress says she's happy to cuddle up with her daughter Ireland instead. "To be honest, I like being alone," Basinger, 50, told German magazine Neue Revue. "I have my daughter and we have our own little world." Basinger, who separated from Baldwin, 46, in 2001 after eight years of marriage, said she was proud of how she handled the break-up, which culminated in divorce in 2002.  I feel stronger because I've remained true to myself," she said. "I've grown so much that I sometimes can't keep up with myself."  When it comes to men, Basinger says she can tolerate just about anything except extreme vanity. "I can handle just about everything, but I can't stand men who are in love with themselves. Those men have a tendency to mistreat women," she said.
	9 luglio: Kim Basinger, da femme fatale a madre premurosa - Ha fatto sognare milioni di uomini. Kim Basinger, sex symbol degli anni '80 - indimenticabile il suo spogliarello in controluce di 9 settimane e mezzo - torna a fare la mamma. Dopo 'Eight mile', dove cercava di accudire il rapper Eminem, rieccola in un ruolo drammatico in "The door in the floor", in uscita negli Stati Uniti. E' la storia di una coppia (lui è Jeff Bridges) che cerca di reagire alla tragedia della morte dei due figli in un incidente d'auto. Un ruolo che ha sentito molto, come ha raccontato alla nostra Silvia Bizio, a Los Angeles. "Ho amato molto questa storia. Il personaggio di Marion è arrivato al momento giusto della mia vita. Se non fossi madre da 9 anni non avrei potuto farlo. Mi sono identificata con la solitudine, il vuoto interiore di questa donna che dopo la perdita dei due figli non riesce a immergersi nell'amore per la figlia piccola, l'unica rimastale. Ho amato molto il fatto che fosse una parte che mi impegnava di più interiormente che fisicamente". Kim Basinger nel frattempo è alle prese con altri due film: una commedia e un thriller. "E' buffo perché giusto qualche tempo fa mi chiedevo quand'è che avrebbero fatto un film su un telefonino! Ed è successo davvero. Ma devo confessare che è piuttosto difficile recitare quando il tuo co-protagonista è un cellulare. L'ho fatto durante "The door in the floor". Poi mi sono trasferita ad Albukerke per "Elvis ha lasciato il palazzo", avevo bisogno di una commedia. Ho lavorato con un gruppo di persone fantastiche. Mi piaceva fare una sorta di film d'azione e un po' da popcorn. Quando ho saputo che c'erano William Masey, Jason Statham e Chris Evans... è stato molto divertente". 18 anni dopo 9 settimane e mezzo, Kim Basinger non ha paura di invecchiare. A 51 anni è sempre bellissima e sta vivendo un periodo favoloso dopo il divorzio burrascoso da Alec Baldwin. Ma qual è il segreto della sua bellezza? "Grazie, lo dico da tanto tempo e può sembrare un po' melenso ma è la verità. Il mio motto è: "Lascia andare e lascia che Dio ci pensi". Ti salvano solo Dio e il senso dell'umorismo: con tutto quello che ho passato nella vita, se non avessi mantenuto il mio senso dell'umorismo e la mia fede in Dio, non credo che sarei qui a parlare di cinema e altre amenità. Certo, potrei dirvi di bere tanta acqua, mangiare sano e fare ginnastica. Ma credo che il tuo aspetto dipenda da quello che ti tiene vivo dentro di te".
	10  luglio: E' prevista per il 25 AGOSTO 2004 l'uscita della versione italiana del DVD del film "FOLLIA D'AMORE" (MGM/UA Home Video).
	11  luglio: Kim Basinger protagoniza The Door in The Floor, un filme que suena para los Oscar - Uno de los rostros más sensuales del cine, Kim Basinger, reaparece en la gran pantalla con The Door in The Floor, junto al actor Jeff Bridges. La película se estrenará a finales de este mes en Estados Unidos y en otoño en España. De momento, el filme promete, y los nombres de los dos actores protagonistas empiezan a sonar para los Oscar. La mítica Kim Basinger se atreve ahora a interpretar el papel de una mujer difícil que vive una crisis matrimonial tras la muerte, en accidente, de sus dos hijos. El actor Jeff Bridges es su marido (Ted Cole), quien, tras el terrible suceso, decide refugiarse en el trabajo y deja de lado a su mujer. La situación lleva a Kim Basinger, Marion Cole en la ficción, a iniciar una aventura con uno de los asistentes de su marido. El distanciamiento de la pareja y los juegos amorosos de la protagonista son seguidos de cerca por la hija de ambos, de tan sólo cuatro años de edad. La historia que nos trae The Door in The Floor, centrada en un matrimonio en crisis, está sacada de la novela Una mujer difícil del escritor John Irving.
	12  luglio: Summary: Challenging, unique script, beautifully directed and edited. "The Door in the Floor" may be one of the best movies so far this  year. It offers a moving experience and memorable characters that you will not soon forget. The story is an adaptation of the best-selling novel, "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving (who also wrote "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules"). I haven't read the book, but the  screenplay by writer/director Tod Williams is so good that it's hard to imagine that it doesn't do justice to its source. (Apparently, the book spans many decades in the life of this family; that's certainly a different approach than what is presented in the film.) Applause to Tod again for his brilliant direction in which he obtains sensitive, extraordinary performances from the sterling cast. Jeff Bridges is sublime as Ted Cole, a children's book author. His character dominates the plot and it's an Academy Award level portrayal. Bridges only gets better with time, and he is at the top of his form here. In a more understated, introspective role, Kim Basinger plays Ted's wife, Marion Cole. It's another performance deserving of Academy Award notice. Basinger's beauty is only exceeded by the depth of her acting ability. Elle Fanning, younger sister of the talented ten-year-old Dakota Fanning ("I Am Sam", "The Cat in the Hat", "Man on Fire") is an amazing, natural talent as young Ruth, daughter of Ted and Marion. Jon Foster plays teenaged Eddie O'Hare in yet another superlative job of acting in this movie. Mimi Rogers supports well as Mrs. Vaughn. Her filmography notes she was born in January 1956, which makes her 48 years old. Few actresses would have the ability to play this movie role. She appears in a tense scene, fully nude, and filmed from every angle while she is revolved on a life model's turntable. Wow! More power to her!"The Door in the Floor" title comes from one of Ted's children's books. We hear the story as Ted does a reading before a local audience. It is clear from the outset that the Cole family is in a state of severe distress, which relates to earlier losses of two sons. Writer/director Tod Williams is masterful in carrying the audience through the gradual and painful exposition of what happened to the couple's children, Tommy and Timothy. Pleased be aware that all of the principals (except Ruthie) are seen in various stages of nudity in this film -- front, side, back and on top of one another. Everything is shown with great subtlety and sensitivity within the delicate context of the film. There was certainly no prurient interest in any of it. All of the nude scenes are handled in a realistic and matter-of-fact way. For example, little Ruthie sees her father naked, which some viewers may find objectionable, but which certainly works within the context of this film. This is a movie for all seasons. It's still early in the year and we can only hope that "The Door in the Floor," with its wonderful script, direction, editing, and acting, will still be remembered as we approach nominations for the best films at the end of the year. Go out of your way to see this A++ accomplishment.
	13  luglio: Un po' di news! Basinger, Bridges a good fit despite obvious differences - Playing a couple for second time Amused by idea of real-life liaison. HOLLYWOOD—Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger get along so well together, it's easy to forget they're supposed to be a warring husband and wife.  They play newly separated couple Ted and Marion Cole in The Door In The Floor, the new movie adaptation of a portion of John Irving's best-selling novel A Widow For One Year, which opens in Toronto on Wednesday. Ted is a serial philanderer; Marion starts an affair with a younger man (Jon Foster). The couple is also torn by a recent tragedy and they have a young daughter (Elle Fanning) to care for. Raw feelings boil over during one hot summer in the Hamptons. But Bridges, 54, and Basinger, 50, greet the press in a hotel interview room with such a genuine feeling of togetherness, it's as if they've just made a romantic comedy together, not a tense family drama.  They put their hands together and hold them up in a sort of victory salute. Later, Basinger rests her hand on Bridges' shoulder as she talks. They're doing their press chores together because Basinger find interviews difficult, while Bridges finds them a breeze.  She gets tense and stares off into the middle distance, trying to avoid eye contact. He has no troubling relaxing — on a previous encounter at the Toronto International Film Festival, Bridges invited a scribe to join him for a drink outdoors by the hotel pool. She is perfectly made up, with blue eye shadow and pink lipstick complementing a dark skirt outfit. He looks, as always, like his ultra-relaxed character The Dude from The Big Lebowski. His white casual shirt is untucked, but it's very clean. But not everything goes the way you'd think, as witness their acting styles. Basinger hates rehearsing, preferring to get the part right the first time. Bridges is a perfectionist, who likes to rehearse his scenes over and over.  The two seem the perfect case of opposites attracting. And they've played a married couple before, in the 1987 screwball comedy Nadine. Could they ever imagine being married to each other for real? Basinger smiles shyly at the question. She looks over at Bridges. "What are you like at home?" she asks him. "I would be afraid of his camera all the time," she quickly adds, referring to Bridges' enthusiasm for photography. (Bridges has made a book of candid photos from The Door In The Floor shoot, as he does for all his movies.) What about Jeff? Could he imagine be married to Kim? "Sure," he drawls, smiling back over at Basinger. "That's one of the cool things about acting, or one of the fun things about it. You get to have these little mini-lifetimes together." That's a good way of putting it, especially since a genuine romance between the two seems out of the question: Bridges has been happily married for 27 years to wife Sue while Basinger is still smarting from her recent divorce to actor Alec Baldwin, the father of her 8-year-old daughter Ireland. Still, Bridges is intrigued by the question. Love is always a good question.  The two parry back and forth on the topic: "Most of the stories that human beings tell have some sort of love story," Bridges says, sitting back in his chair, putting his hands together as he thinks.  "As an actor, that's kind of your assignment. I often find, with the other actors I work with, that when you open your heart ... and you have another person doing that same thing, how accessible love really is. I thought I could probably fall in love with all my leading ladies." "I understand what he means," Basinger interjects. "We're kind of like gypsies and we do form these families ... but it's dangerous to get into the fantasy. I think we've all been there." "That's the danger," Bridges agrees. "In the movie of my real life, my leading lady is my wife Sue. I'm madly in love with her. So I've done all the things that I can kind of fantasize. We open our hearts and we do this. I've got somebody who I can do that with (his wife) who also — and it's one of the things I love about her — allows me to go off and do this kind of art that I do.  "She allows me to have these kinds of relationships with women like Kim, these gorgeous ladies. She feels secures enough in our love to allow me to go out there ... and I cherish that." Bridges has a couple of nude scenes in the movie. He seems completely relaxed about this, too, and Basinger enjoys it. "I loved them!" Basinger says, laughing. "It's just part of the deal," Bridges replies. "No biggie, really. I had done some nude scenes before. There are wonderful tapes that they have where you can actually tape your glutes up." Did he really do that? "No," Bridges says, smirking. "We just let it all go." "You know what's really good about this movie?" Basinger interjects, now fully involved in the conversation. "It looks so American, and yet it has such a sense of being shot in such a European fashion, with the looseness of it and the freedom and the way this family lived their lives.  "And I think that Jeff and I, in a strange way, although we work so differently, we complement each other. He's a real daring actor. I don't think that I can think of a more daring actor than this guy right here. I think if it makes perfect sense for that character (being daring), then that's where you go." The high comfort factor between Basinger and Bridges rubbed off on other cast members. Good thing, too, because the movie has a fair amount of sex and nudity besides Bridges' in-the-buff displays. Basinger had to come to grips with the idea of having numerous bedroom scenes with 19-year-old Jon Foster, whose previous movie role was playing a gas station cashier in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. Foster plays Eddie, the Bridges character's young assistant in The Door In The Floor who has a crush on the boss's wife. The attraction leads to a wild and risky affair, for the older woman seeking release and the younger man seeking direction.  Foster is just as shy in person as he is on the screen. He once played the blanket-tugging Linus in a school production of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown.  Basinger says the love scenes with Foster didn't bother her one bit.  "Oh, those scenes? He was an angel; he's the real thing. He just can't pull back. There wasn't a false moment in his face or in anything else. He's just a gentleman and a great partner on the screen. We really developed a real friendship, the two of us. I kind of look at him like my Summer Of '42 and Harold & Maude at the same time." In an interview prior to Bridges' and Basinger's arrival, Foster was also full of praise. "I wouldn't say I was intimidated, but I was nervous," he said. "But it was such a well-written movie." Making The Door In The Floor with such pleasant company must have been therapeutic for Basinger. Besides her bitter divorce from Baldwin, she also had back problems bedevilling her.  "Nobody knows how difficult a time that was," she says, reluctantly addressing the issue. "Physically, I had just had a back operation, so that was my concern: Could I do what was required of me in the physical scenes and with an operation that didn't go so perfectly well? I had to have two more." Her concerns were strong enough that she initially said no when director Todd Williams offered the part. But he insisted the part was right for her, so she relented. "We all have a journey and we all have hurdles and challenges to get through and I've lived a lot of lifetimes in my short or lengthy life," Basinger says. "But I've drawn from all of this and I was so drawn to the Marion character, to the way she was written, as Jeff has said. This is just an amazing piece. I couldn't forget her ... her aloneness and everything she was feeling at the time." Marion has given up on marriage. Does Basinger feel the same way? "I think marriage is phenomenal," she says. "I don't hold anything against marriage. Who knows what's up the road?" Denerstein: Bridges paints believable roles. If Jeff Bridges' 85-year-old mother, Dorothy, had her way, her son would play nothing but doctors and presidents. Happily, mom gave her approval to his latest effort, even though it involves neither a professional nor a world leader. The Door in the Floor, which opens Wednesday at the Mayan, allows Bridges to play a character who frequently appears at his worst. An adaptation of the first part of a lengthy John Irving novel (A Widow For One Year), the movie casts Bridges as Ted Cole, a bestubbled, womanizing author of children's books. Cole has a capacity for both generosity and cruelty. He drinks too much. As is the case with much of Irving's material, comedy and tragedy become almost indistinguishable in The Door In The Floor. Ted and his estranged wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), are dealing with the deaths of their two teenage sons. (Bridges and Basinger worked together previously in 1987's Nadine.) Ted's doing his best to be a father to 4-year- old Ruth (Elle Fanning), the daughter who was born in an attempt to create consolation for the couple's previous loss. Basinger's character has lost her capacity for motherhood. Directed by Tod Williams, who also wrote the script, the film takes place in East Hampton, Long Island, against a balmy summer backdrop. The movie, which deals with issues of love and loss, kicks in when an aspiring preppie writer from Exeter (John Foster) arrives to spend a summer as Ted's apprentice. The 54-year-old Bridges, who paints as well as acts, did the illustrations we see in Ted's books. "I was hoping to do the life drawings, too. The naked women," said Bridges in a recent phone interview. "But I was under a deadline to get the children's things done." About those life drawings. Ted lures women into his life by offering to draw them. Ultimately, he puts them through an arc that begins with flattery and ends with degradation. How did Bridges approach such a complex character? "Kind of like I do most of them," he says. "You're looking at the script. That's the bible. Also, you look at what people in the script say about your character. If you have a book, like we did in this film, that's a wealth of information. It can really give you great insight into the character." Bridges had no trepidation about appearing in a truncated version of Irving's novel, although it's not clear how the author's fans will react to seeing only a portion of the book. "It was a big plus for me that John Irving liked the screenplay very much. I think it was a good idea (to make the movie about one part of the novel). Instead of trying to make a watered-down version of the whole book, we did a more in-depth version of one-third of it." For Bridges, last seen in the hit Seabiscuit, the allure of the character of Ted Cole was multifaceted. "The drawing was an interesting thing, one of the more fun aspects of the character. There were a lot of tragic aspects, too. You can't imagine anything more horrible than losing a child. Besides, John Irving draws such great characters and tells such wonderful stories, stories that encompass tragedy and comedy. It feels very lifelike to me. "Ted prides himself in his willingness to tell the truth. But another aspect of him is his own self-loathing, for not being able to tell the truth to himself, for not being strong enough to even feel the truth. That kind of manifests itself in cruelty to others." In one of the movie's cruelest scenes, Ted tells his charge what he thinks of his attempts at writing. "He rips into the boy's writing. He gives him valuable information, but he also humiliates him and tears him down." Of course, there's a bit of subtext working here, as well. By this time, the boy has become involved in a sexual relationship with Marion. The Door in the Floor calls for Bridges to expose more than his emotions. Ted has a habit - part of the way he unsettles others - of stripping off his clothes and showering out of doors. "I loved that part of the character. It's funny and tells a lot about him. He's very comfortable with his body and his style. He also uses it to intimidate." Bridges, whose father was the late Lloyd Bridges, definitely knows something about family. He has three daughters (ages 22, 21 and 18), a brother (actor Beau) and a mom who set a strong example in the parenthood department. Bridges' mother, an inveterate journal writer, recopied the parts of her diary pertaining to each of her sons and presented it to them on their 21st birthdays. It was like receiving a homemade biography. Bridges doesn't keep a journal, but he, his daughters and his wife exchange a book in which they write things to one another. No time limits. No particular structure. Write when you have something to say. "Sometimes, you can write in a letter something that's easier to say than saying it to someone in person," he says. "And you don't have to hear their response. It's a good thing." Toward the end of The Door in the Floor, in a comic twist of fate, Bridges' character winds up in a strange summer outfit: pink pants and a pink shirt. Did he keep the outfit and, if so, where does he wear it? "No, I gave those back. I kept the muu muu, though (a kaftan-like nightgown that Ted wears, even when playing squash). I wear it around the house. My mother makes these big kaftan things for the family. But she didn't make this one. The film's costumer had it made." Next on Bridges's schedule: a period of "falling apart" in Montana. He just finished filming The Moguls, a movie about a group of men who join forces to make an adult film. "I haven't figured out quite how to talk about it," he says. "You make these movies and spend all this time trying to be subtle and then it gets down to a sound bite. So here's the sound bite: 'It's as if Frank Capra made a porn movie.' It has a lot of heart to it - and it's bizarre." Bridges has been in almost 60 movies and TV productions since he appeared as a kid with his father on episodes of Sea Hunt and The Lloyd Bridges Show. He's seldom been anything less than believable. "I judge myself and my work by whether I've given it my best shot . . . It has nothing to do with how the movie ultimately comes out. I do my work and somebody cuts it up and makes a collage out of it. But it's about how much I have committed. On that level, I give myself pretty good marks. I'm pretty diligent."  BEHIND 'THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR': Tod Williams (l.) has written and directed the latest adaptation of a novel by John Irving (r.). His efforts won the author's blessings.One novel's happy journey to film. "You have to put your expectations in some other place when you watch a film (and you've already read the book). It will never be the same as the book. NEVER!" reads one posting by a member of the online group "John Irving is God." Perhaps. But "The Door in the Floor," opening nationwide Monday, comes pretty close to the Irving book it's based on - or at least to the first 200 pages. To Mr. Irving, the adaptation of his dense and lengthy novel, "A Widow for One Year," is "word for word, the most faithful translation of any of my books to film." Even more faithful, he says, than his own Oscar-winning adaptation of "The Cider House Rules." Director Tod Williams did the honors this time, choosing only one of the book's three parts for his screenplay. The movie unfolds over the course of a summer, when Ruth Cole is 4 years old. Her father, played by Jeff Bridges, is a famous children's book author and rakish philanderer. Her mother, Kim Basinger, despondent over the loss of their two sons, is distracted from her grief by the prep-school boy her husband hires as his assistant. It's the fifth Irving novel to be made into a film (a feat which, though it may not place him in a class with Stephen King, does, according to one screenwriter, put him in a "very special category"). While Irving seems to have to come to terms with those early films - "The World According to Garp," "The Hotel New Hampshire," and "Simon Birch," which deviated so far from "A Prayer for Owen Meany" that he is said to have asked that the film's title be changed - it wasn't until the "The Cider House Rules" that he began to embrace Hollywood. "I'm not a moviegoer, having seen only two movies in a movie theater in the last 10 years," writes Irving in "My Movie Business," his 1999 memoir about adapting "The Cider House Rules." Those films - "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient" - he watched only because he was told they were better than the books. He disagreed. Has Irving since seen any films better than their novel counterparts? "I've seen many, but they don't come from very good books," he says, in a meeting room at Boston's Ritz-Carlton with Mr. Williams by his side. "Which is why it's much riskier to go after a good book," says Williams, "and something I would typically want to avoid." He needn't have worried; Irving is delighted by his approach. "Not only do readers ... feel that they're really back in the territory of the book," Irving says, "but even better, from my perspective, is that for people who see this movie and don't know the book, Acts II and III are perfectly intact." The end is untrammeled, left safe in the memories of his admirers. Whether fans will agree is uncertain. Those who know the book may find the movie abrupt - and be startled when the credits roll after so small a slice of the story. But Irving gives the final product his glowing endorsement: "Without qualification, the two best films made from novels of mine are 'The Cider House Rules' and this one, 'The Door in the Floor.' " This is unusual in the adaptation business, says Howard Rodman, chairman of the writing division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema. "For an author to be happy with the movie ... is a very rare and wonderful thing." As long as Irving's happy, so is fan Gary Norris. "If Irving's OK with it, then I'm OK with it," he says. A Seattle archivist and librarian, he has more than 130 copies of "The World According to Garp." Next, Irving and Williams are considering a film version of Irving's most recent novel, "The Fourth Hand." The movie poster for this adaptation of a section of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year is both striking and completely appropriate (a rare occurrence in a Hollywood promotion). The movie poster for this adaptation of a section of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year is both striking and completely appropriate (a rare occurrence in a Hollywood promotion).  Ted Cole, a shambling, semi-dissolute and yet more-or-less self-possessed writer of children's books (played by Jeff Bridges as a grey-bearded and, yes, shambolic stand-in for novelist John Irving) is pictured in the extreme bottom-right of the poster with only the upper-half of his face visible, eyes pensive or perhaps hollow. Behind him is wife Marion (Kim Basinger, as rigid throughout as the role requires), face in full view, eyes distant and directed to her right. The majority of the image depicts the metaphorically perfect sky-and-sea emptiness of the East Hampton, New York, setting. The Coles are-and have been for years-mourning the death of their two teenaged sons, both of whom died in the same car accident. Ted and Marion have a four-year-old daughter named Ruth (Elle Fanning), conceived and born after the tragedy in an attempt by her parents to start anew. Precocious Ruth relies on the stories about, and photographs of, her deceased brothers to assuage the angst (only semi-conscious) caused by the increasing distance between her parents.  Enter university student and would-be writer Eddie (Jon Foster), an Exeter student come to the Cole home as a "writer's assistant" to Ted. Eddie has little to do other than function as a chauffeur (drinker Ted has lost his license) and run menial errands. In a The Summer of 42 moment (signaled by Basinger's 40s bathing suit), he begins a sexual relationship with Marion-something recognized and begrudgingly accepted by the constantly philandering Ted. The summer unfolds... The notion of profound loss is at the heart of Tod Williams' drama, as it is at the heart of the novels of Irving. Remember The Hotel New Hampshire's "keep passing the open windows," spoken as a mantra to try and avoid the inevitable tragedies of life? The "door in the floor" refers to the title of Ted's most famous children's novel, and it is a straight representation of Pandora's Box-open it and all hell will enter what was once paradise. As summer progresses and Ted, Marion, young Jon and even younger Ruth try to deal with life as it has become, the simmering family problems boil over. Bridges is perfect, striding or stumbling around in a loose-fitting kaftan-like body shirt reminiscent of Michael Douglas' bedraggled house coat in Wonder Boys. Basinger is sexy and cold as her near-comatose role requires. If only the young Foster had the presence of, say, Toby Maguire in the above-mentioned Wonder Boys.  IN ACTING, BRIDGES DRAWS ON HIS ART - Los Angeles -- Even when he's playing a cad, Jeff Bridges is a hard actor to hate. In "The Door in the Floor," based on John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year," the affable 54-year-old Bridges had his work cut out for him. He portrays rich and famous children's book author Ted Cole, who copes with the deaths of his sons and a disintegrating marriage to wife Marion (Kim Basinger) by drinking too much, bullying his young apprentice (played by newcomer Jon Foster) and painting progressively more degrading nude portraits of a woman he's having an affair with (Mimi Rogers).  "I never really went out of my way to make him likable," Bridges says. Dressed in a white shirt and khakis, he relaxes in a semi-supine sprawl on the couch of his Beverly Hills hotel suite, eyeing a bowl of fruit on the coffee table, where he's plopped his sneaker-clad feet. "It was kind of a fine line because you didn't want to make him so despicable that you wouldn't want to follow the story. At the same time, we didn't want to make him so sweet that it was unrealistic.  "One of the other things that fascinated me about the guy is the way he compartmentalizes. That's one of the themes of the film -- how people deal with tragedy. My character is able somehow to make art about it. He values these uncomfortable feelings, he almost courts them. He considers it heroic and bold and artistic, that he is able to bear witness and challenge himself in that way. (His wife is) jealous of him because he can move on, yet he's jealous of her because she can feel things more deeply."  "The Door on the Floor" offered one additional incentive for Bridges: He got to create the artwork for his character. Bridges is something of a renaissance man when he's not making movies. Last fall his first book of black- and-white photographs, "Pictures," was published. Bridges also plays guitar and has a home recording studio, where he made his first album last year with singer-songwriter Michael McDonald.  "The fact that the guy I played was an illustrator, that was a big attraction for me," Bridges says. "This film reminded me of 'The Fabulous Baker Boys,' where I was called upon to play piano, because I love music and play a little bit. It's always fun to be able to use different aspects of yourself in movies. But Ted is more willful and self-serving than Jack Baker ever was."  Writer-director Tod Williams had unsuccessfully pitched Bridges on two previous projects, including the filmmaker's debut movie, "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole," before sending him the "Door on the Floor" script.  "I'd like to imagine that the complexity of the character sucked him in for this project," Williams says, "but I also think it was the fact that Jeff could do the drawings. When we weren't shooting, Jeff was using this extra room on one of our locations as his art studio. He made hundreds of giant drawings that were all over the floor and pinned up on the wall. Every morning when we'd break for scenes, he'd be off working on his nudes."  Although Bridges comes across nearly as laid back as his Dude character from "The Big Lebowski," Williams discovered that the actor can be a handful. When they first met about the project, Bridges, who was midway through the filming of Bob Dylan's "Masked and Anonymous," grilled Williams extensively, referring to a legal pad he'd crammed with 20 pages of questions and notes. Once onboard, he spent months mastering racquetball, memorized a 13-minute monologue, read through the entire script until 1 in the morning with Jon Foster to make sure the young actor would be a good match, then showed up, after completing "Seabiscuit," on the "Door in the Floor" shoot in New York brimming with ideas.  Bridges lives in Santa Barbara, where he raised three daughters, with his wife, Susan Geston, whom he met on a dude ranch during the filming of "Rancho Deluxe" in 1975. Over the decades, Bridges has produced a remarkably consistent body of work, including four Oscar nominations spanning Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 "The Last Picture Show" through 2001's "The Contender."  He credits the easygoing believability that infuses nearly all of his performances to lessons learned with his brother Beau from their father, actor Lloyd Bridges, who cast the boys occasionally in his hit 1960s TV series "Sea Hunt."  "When I was a little kid, my father taught me the basics," Bridges says. "He'd set me on his bed, have me recite the lines and then say, 'Now just say it the way you'd say it. Change the words if you want. OK, now go out of the room and come back in and say it like this is the first time it's ever happened.' Then my dad would tell me to go back out there again but do it differently this time.  "So even now you can work on two aspects of a script kind of separately," Bridges says. "Natural -- how it would be if you said it -- and then seeing it more from the character's point of view. You keep doing that, and they all kind of blend up, and then you forget all of that and you show up on the set, you put your clothes on, and you just be there."  Basinger happier alone - Los Angeles - Kim Basinger says she is not prepared to enter a new relationship following her divorce from Alec Baldwin. The actress says she's happy to cuddle up with her daughter Ireland instead. "To be honest, I like being alone," Basinger, 50, told German magazine Neue Revue. "I have my daughter and we have our own little world." Basinger, who separated from Baldwin, 46, in 2001 after eight years of marriage, said she was proud of how she handled the break-up, which culminated in divorce in 2002. "I feel stronger because I've remained true to myself," she said. "I've grown so much that I sometimes can't keep up with myself." When it comes to men, Basinger says she can tolerate just about anything except extreme vanity. "I can handle just about everything, but I can't stand men who are in love with themselves. Those men have a tendency to mistreat women," she said. Jeff Bridges: The Artist - (CBS) Back in 1998, the John Irving novel, "The Widow for One Year" sat atop the New York Times Best Seller's list. Now it has been adapted for the big screen in "The Door in the Floor." In it, Jeff Bridges stars as an artist dealing with a divorce, and the tragic death of his two sons.  Bridges visits The Early Show on Wednesday and tells co-anchor Harry Smith that for a self-described lazy person he keeps a busy man's schedule.  Speaking of “The Door in the Floor,” Bridges says, though it is tragic, it is “a John Irving story, so there’s a lot of comedy interwoven in the tragedy.”  The film reunites him with his "Nadine" co-star, Kim Basinger. “It was great getting back together with her,” Bridges says. “It was like we had a long weekend off and we’re back to work again. Picked up where we left off.”  Asked if he turns down movies, he says, “Yeah. I’ve got to be kind of dragged to the party. I generally like to do movies that I like to see. Those are movies where the filmmakers are kind of ahead of you.”  After garnering rave reviews for his performance in "Seabiscuit," last summer and being nominated for four Academy Awards throughout his career, Bridges says, “It would be lovely to have that gold guy, you know. It’s wonderful to be acknowledged, to get a nomination.”  He credits his father Lloyd Bridges for teaching him the tricks of the trade. Jeff Bridges and his brother Beau grew up playing drowning victims and the like on their father’s popular syndicated TV series "Sea Hunt" (1957-61).  Jeff Bridges says, “Probably my first acting memory is having to say my lines in the water and inhaling and not being able to exhale. He taught me all the basics.”  His mother, Dorothy Dean, also reads all the scripts he gets. “I love to get her feedback,” he says. “We rarely agree on the material but it’s nice to get her opinion.”  And when he is not on the big screen he occupies his time doing visual art pieces. You can find them on his Web site as well as his music and his commentary on his acting.  Some Facts About Jeff Bridges  Jeff Bridges was born in Los Angeles, Dec. 4, 1949.  He is the son of actor Lloyd Bridges (a familiar face on TV and the large screen for over 50 years, until his death in 1998), and the brother of actor Beau Bridges (working steadily, like his Dad, since age 7).  In 1950, Bridges made his first screen appearance at the age of four months, playing the infant in Jane Greer's arms in "The Company She Keeps."  Jeff Bridges, and his brother Beau, appeared in their father's popular syndicated television series "Sea Hunt" (1957-61) and on "The Lloyd Bridges Show" (CBS, 1962-63).  In 1971, Bridges earned a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for his role in "The Last Picture Show."  In 1984, Bridges earn his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the Earth-bound alien in "Star Man."  In 1987, he delivered a nicely comic, foolish turn opposite Kim Basinger in Benton's "Nadine."  In 1989, he starred opposite brother Beau and Michelle Pfeiffer in "The Fabulous Baker Boys."  In 1991, acted opposite Robin Williams in "The Fisher King", directed by Terry Gilliam.  In 1992, made his producing debut with "American Heart," directed by Martin Bell; also starred as an ex-convict trying to do right by his son (Edward Furlong); shown at Cannes; released theatrically in the USA in 1993.  In 1994, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And acted again with father in "Blown Away."  In 1996, starred opposite Barbra Streisand as a professor who wants to move slowly where love is concerned in the Streisand-directed "The Mirror Has Two Faces." He also was executive producer of Showtime's "Hidden in America", starring brother Beau and directed by Bell; played small role in the telefilm.  In 1997, he displayed a humorous side as 'The Dude', the cable-surfing, herb-smoking, Olympian slacker in "The Big Lebowski."  In 1999, he released his first solo album, "Be Here Soon" and launched Internet Web site www.jeffbridges.com.  In 2003, he co-starred as an influential millionaire in the inspiring feature "Seabiscuit."  Bridges is an accomplished photographer and a talented guitarist Jeff Bridges says solid family life provides foundation for acting career - The photograph has seen better days. It's faded, folded and torn at the corner. With the care of a man handling a newborn infant, Jeff Bridges takes the keepsake out of his wallet.  "I've been married for 27 years," he says. "At all times I keep a photograph in my pocket of the very first words I ever uttered to my wife, Susan."  That was in 1975, and Susan Geston was working as a maid at a Montana dude ranch where the movie Rancho Deluxe (1975), starring a 27-year-old Bridges, was being filmed.  "I walked up to her and asked her for a date," he recalls, "and she said no. The look on my face was so crestfallen that the set photographer, who was in the vicinity, took a snap of both her and me.  "She said, `Oh, you think you Hollywood guys can come in here and get all the local girls?' " the 55-year-old actor recalls, smiling. "Incidentally, at the time my future wife said this to me, she had a broken nose and two black eyes from a car accident."  She did have one more thing to add, though.  "Of course, it is a small town," she said. "Maybe I'll see you around."  The two did in fact run into each other at a local bar a few nights later. They danced. They kissed.  "That was it for me," Bridges says. "I was gone. And now it's 27 years later, and people ask me the secret to a happy marriage. I really do think it's about the communication, keeping the lines open.  "And for me it really was love at first sight," he adds. "I was really bowled over by Susan right away, and that never stopped."  The question of marital happiness is relevant because, in his latest film, Bridges plays a husband for whom love has long since faded. The Door in the Floor, opening nationwide on July 14, casts him as Ted Cole, a children's-book author who's trying to cope with the tragic deaths of his two teenage sons and the gulf that has developed between him and his wife (Kim Basinger).  "I did the role because it interweaves the tragic and the comic sides of us as human beings," Bridges says. "That's great fun to play."  Certain aspects of the film also struck a personal chord with Bridges.  "It's a little-known story, but my parents lost a child just before I was born," he says. "His name was Gary Bridges, and he died of sudden infant death syndrome. Obviously my father was no longer with me when I made this film, but my mom helped me in the preparation. We talked about her feelings at the time Gary died, and how it affected her relationship with my dad.  "There was a tragic aspect of life in our own family," Bridges continues. "Gary's death and the aftermath lasted a long, long time. My mom explained that there were different stages that both she and my father went through. It's just about how, as adults, we bury the pain."  In the film, Bridges' character basically leaves the family and falls into a drunken stupor. Even so, the actor says, he didn't play the character as an evil man.  " `Evil' is such a strong word. I identified with this man, in that I have a self-serving side. There's a selfish aspect to this character, and I feel like there's a certain part of myself that has that, as well."  The film reunites Bridges with Basinger, his co-star in Nadine (1987).  "It's amazing to me that we did that film almost 20 years ago," he says, shaking his head. "It doesn't seem that way. It seems like we had a long weekend and came back to work."  Bridges -- whose father was actor Lloyd Bridges and whose brother is actor Beau Bridges -- made his screen debut as an infant being held by Jane Greer in The Company She Keeps (1950). Since then he's amassed an enviable list of credits that include The Last Picture Show (1971), Heaven's Gate (1980), Starman (1984), Jagged Edge (1985), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), Fearless (1993), Arlington Road (1999) and Seabiscuit (2003).  Even now, though, he admits to being a nervous actor.  "I remember working with Robert Ryan on The Iceman Cometh (1973)," he says. "We'd do these long scenes together, and he would leave his hands on the table before we started. When he would lift his hands, there would be puddles of sweat underneath them.  "I would say, `Bob, are you nervous?' " he recalls. "And he would reply, `I'd be really concerned if I wasn't nervous.'  "It taught me that even these old guys who have been acting for years still sweat, and it's fine for me to experience that, as well," Bridges says. "You kind of befriend that fear a little bit. It's kind of like an old buddy; you can almost count on it.  "On a good project, I don't want to drop the ball," he concludes. "I really want to do a good job, and that wanting can sometimes get in your way."  Next up for Bridges is the currently filming The Moguls, co-starring Ted Danson.  "I play a guy going through a midlife crisis," he says, smiling. "He's a blue-collar guy in a very small town, and he decides to get the whole town together and make a pornographic film."  Between movies Bridges lives with his wife and daughters Isabelle, Jessica and Hayley in Santa Barbara, Calif. So far, he says, none of the three plans to go into the family business.  "None of them have decided to go that way," he says, "but I wouldn't be surprised if they changed their minds. They're all talented in the arts -- I guess it's in the genes."  His wife is happy running their household, Bridges says, and he's grateful for having so solid a family life, to which he credits his success in coping with Hollywood for so many years.  "It helps immensely," Bridges says. "In fact, one of the things that Francis Ford Coppola tells young actors, when they ask for his advice, is to get married and have a family. It's so true, because it gives you a reason to make a living, which is to support your family. You also feel grounded, because you're not trying to find a mate. You're not running around doing crazy stuff -- you've got a home base.  "My wife is home," he says. "It's like she's holding the kite string. I can fly around, but I always have somewhere to come back to."  'The Door in the Floor': Actor Jeff Bridges - Jeff Bridges is a four-time Academy Award nominee for his performances in The Contender, Starman, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Last Picture Show.  He made his acting debut on his father Lloyd's television series, Sea Hunt. Since then, he has starred in nearly 60 films including The Fisher King, Seabiscuit and The Big Lebowski.  In his latest film, The Door in the Floor, directed by Tod Williams, Bridges co-stars with Academy Award winner Kim Basinger. The film is based on the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving.  Yakima, Wa.: Loved you in Thunderbolt, and Baker Boys. You seem to excell at playing these free spirits. Is there a part of you that's really like that? Steven Larsen  Jeff Bridges: I suppose. Ther's an equal part of me that's a homebody but I do suppose I do have a free spirit as well. With the 'Baker Boys' that fellow I played was a musician and I love music, it was a dream come true. Falls Church, VA: What is the most beautiful place you've seen on the planet?  Jeff Bridges: A couple of spots come to mind, we shot 'King Kong' in the volcano on the island of Kaui, I love Big Sur in Cali - that's a favorite place of mine. I love Montana where I've made several movies, I loved it so much that I bought a ranch there. Atlanta, GA: Hello Mr. Bridges - HUGE fan here. Two questions. How was it reuniting with Kim Basinger 22 years after Nadine for Door in the Floor?  Jeff Bridges: It was a great fun, it was like we picked up where we left off. It was like we had a long weekend and then went back to work. We approached the work in a different way, I like to rehearse and discuss the work and she likes to really have the work between action and cut, that's her method. But we come off on the screen together very well and she did a great job in 'Door in the Floor' as she did in Nadine, we played married couples in both films. Don, Boston: I have to say that you are one of my favorite actors and I am very excited to see The Door in the Floor - loved the book. Of your roles, do you have a favorite and why? Personally, I think your perfomance in Fearless was brilliant. Oh - funky website too!  Jeff Bridges: I don't really have a singular favorite, 'Fearless was a great experience for me. I don't have one movie that is my favorite, I have about 25-30 favorites. Cincinnati, OH: In your role as "The Dude" in The Big Lebowski, did you draw from previous experiences in your own life to come up with the suttle manerisms required for this character?  Jeff Bridges: Yeah, I think a lot of just came from I guess some memory work. We weren't smoking in the movie but I have rolled a few joints in my time. Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life. I use those as well. Rod in Tallahassee Florida: You are one of my favorites, Mr. Bridges. Thanks for your art. Have you and your brother and Michelle Pfeiffer ever thought about recreating your characters from "The Fabulous Baker Boys"? That film is a classic to me. And is your book of photographs from your films available for purchase?  Jeff Bridges: As far as a sequel, I would love to get together with that team again. Steve Klovis is a great director, would love to work with him again. He wrote all the screenplays for 'Harry Potter.' Michelle is terrific, one of my favorite actresses. And working with my brother is a dream come true and working with music is a wonderful experience I would most certainly consider doing another one. My book is called 'Pictures' it's available in bookstores, they are in third print you can get it on Amazon, I believe. It's compilation of photos I've taken over the years on movie sets. NY, NY: Hey there Jeff! The Big Lebowski has to be one of my favorite movies. You had such a good chemistry with your costars. There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in the picture. Why do you not do more comio movies? Was it a fun set on which to work? I can't wait to see The Door in the Floow - I loved John Irving's book. Thanks for all your great work!  Jeff Bridges: It was a great movie to work on, and I'm very pleased with the results it's a great movie. Whenever it comes on TV, I usually get sucked in I got to watch Turturro suck the bowling ball. Usually, if one of my films comes on TV, I can only watch a scene or two but with 'Big Lebowski' I watch everything. As far as comedy there are comedic moments in 'Door in the Floor' and there's comedy in my upcoming film 'Moguls' as well. Memphis, Tenn.: Loved your work in Against All Odds. Has there ever been talk about doing a sequel to that movie?  Jeff Bridges: No talk of a sequel to that one, but I liked that film as well. Niceville, FL: Mr Bridges, I loved the movie "Starman", but was wondering what was the hardest thing to conquer in acting like an alien?  Jeff Bridges: I had to start from scratch, the way I approached the character, I knew I really had to pull off that scene when he was born, when he comes to life because the rest of the movie would be like that, a slow process in becoming human. I had a dancer friend Russel Clark (who I thought could be an alien), he was a great guy. I hired him to work with me on dance movements and try to lose my normal movements. I wanted to rediscover what it would be like to use the human body as a little ride, controlling my body as if through external forces. Also, I observed my own children who were very young at the time and how they moved and saw the world through fresh eyes. Captain Average, Calgary, AB, Canada: From "Starman" to "The Fisher King", to "The Big Lebowski", you've made a number of oddly memorable characters come to life. It seems that you give better perfromances when you skirt the edges of the so-called normal. Which of your characters required the most work and ingenuity on your part, and how did your own need to challenge yourself lead to "The Door In The Floor"?  Jeff Bridges: I can't think of one that was the most challenging because I'm attracted to scripts and films that I like and would like to see and the challenge in that is to not blow it and not drop the ball and I have that point of concern. I care about the films and I worry that I might drop the ball. 'Door in the Floor,' the challenge was doing the drawings as a children's illustrator. I guess I didn't have to take this challenge on because someone else could have drawn those for me, but I decided to do the drawings myself. There was another challenge, there was a life studies drawings in the film as well and I took some figure drawing classes but since I had to get my children's drawings done as well I didn't have time to take on that challenge. Someone else had to do those drawings for the film instead of me. So although there are challenges in film, they are always fun and I learn a lot through them.  portland or: Your father the late great Lloyd Brides was one of the funniest people alive. How would you describe him as a Dad?  Jeff Bridges: He was a wonderful father. He was a great dad and game me a lot a support. Unlike other actors, he loved show biz, he did everything he could to make it available to his kids. He encouraged all of us to become actors, all of my basic training comes from him. I can remember him sitting on my bed telling me about Sea Hunt. We had an open relationship I could talk to him about anything, he taught me through great example. He lived a great life.  Centreville, VA: Jeff, What type of camera do you use; where can I purchase it; and where can I get it serviced?  Jeff Bridges: I use Wide-Lux F8. You might be able to find it on the Internet but I understand in Japan, in the factory where they are built, it burned down. The Wide Lux is a panning still lens to give you a panoramic view. Hong Kong: Hello Jeff, If you had not pursued acting as a career, what other profession would you have chosen? And what's Beau up to these days? Thanks for the good stuff you've done so far. Best regards, Weston Jost  Jeff Bridges: Music would be on the top of that list, I love music and I was able to realize an old dream of mine. I released a CD a couple of years ago called 'Be Here Soon', is available on Amazon and soon the iTunes store. I love doing artistic things like drawing, painting, I make ceramics, so something in the arts I would imagine. Salt Lake City, UT.: I enjoyed your performance in "Sea Biscuit." Do you have any inclination to direct a film in the near future?  Jeff Bridges: I don't know, you never know what's in the cards O'Fallon, Mo: You were great in,"WildBill". Will you make any other Westerns?  Jeff Bridges: I love westerns, I'd love to make more of them. 'Wild Bill' was a lot of fun, working with the director was great. The character was amazing to play. It's such a rich period in our country's history. fargo,nd: are you aware of how popular the movie the big lebowski is? i just attended a big lebowski film festival in las vegas...and all of us there are cordially inviting you to the next one. will you do us the greatest honor by accepting our invitation?  Jeff Bridges: There have been a few of those festivals over the years, I've never been but I would love to go some time. I hope they're around for a while, I've seen pictures and it looks like everyone is having a good time. North Pole, Alaska: Of all your movies, which leading lady would you love to do another movie with?  Jeff Bridges: That's tough question. I've worked with some great ones. I'd love to work with Michelle again, she's been doing the mom thing so she hasn't been on screen for a while. But she was wonderful to work with. Darlington, Maryland: Hey Jeff. I think you and McQueen have always been my favorite. Could I ask how tall you are? Got a bet going. Phil  Manhattan, Montana: Hi Jeff, What was it like working with Slim Pickens in Rancho Deluxe? The movie remains one of my favorites and must have been fun to make. Any good stories? Thanks, Paul  Jeff Bridges: Slim was great to work with, he has a monologue in the movie that always cracks me up. He's one of my favorite actors, I loved his performance in 'Strange Love.' Overland Park, KS: One of my favorite movies, which never got the attention or respect it deserved, is "Fearless". Do you seek out challenging scripts like "Fearless," "Lebowski" and "Fisher King" - or do casting directors seek you out knowing you have a special talent for these offbeat roles?  Jeff Bridges: Kind of both. I certainly keep my ears and eyes open for all new material like that. And my agent knows my taste. One of the reasons that I like to different types of characters that it sends a message out to people that I can do different characters and different types. I usually pick the ones that are the ones that I would like to see and work with filmmakers that are ahead of the curve and I'm interested in films that suprise you. Toledo, Oh: Always he enjoyed the characters you have played! Would you consider a screw ball comedy role like with the Farrelly Brothers or David Zucker, also ever plan to work with the Coen Brothers again?  Jeff Bridges: I would love to work with the Coen brothers, they're right up there with my favorites. The Farrelly brothers and Zucker have done some good stuff, I'd consider it.  Bloomington, IN: "American Heart" was one of the most deeply moving films I have ever seen. What are your memories of this movie and have you kept in touch with your co-star Edward Furlong?  Jeff Bridges: I'm very proud of that movie, it was the first film I produced. And it's based on a great documentary called 'Streetwise' directed by Martin Bell. I lost touch with Eddie I haven't seen him in years, he's a great young actor. He was the first guy we saw to play that part. We'd already gone through 40 kids but we were looking for someone who was rough around the edges, that would portray the character's rough journey believably. Ed just knocked us out, he was perfect. Little Rock, AR: Dear Jeff, how does your character in "The Door in the FLoor" differ from other characters you've played that have had to cope with tragedy such as the shock jock Jack in "The Fisher King" and the airplane crash survivor Max in "Fearless"?  Jeff Bridges: Actually those characters there are similarities to my character in 'Door in the Floor.' 'Fearless' and 'Fisher King' deal with how people deal with tragedy in the lives and that's one the major themes in 'Door in the Floor.' People deal with tragedy in many different ways, some it paralyzes and some go into denial so they can function but yet they have this seed of tragedy that can runs their lives. Each of those characters in those three films deal with their tragedies slightly differently. Earlville, NY: Hi Jeff, Are you or have you recorded any new music? I have your previus CD. It's great. Are you still doing work for the Hunger program? Love all your big screen work...I wish you the best in all your future endeavors & in life. Barbara  Jeff Bridges: I'm gathering material for another album but there's no immediate plans to get started on it. I'm still working with Hunger here in America and we're working on school feeding programs, and trying to bring attention to the fact that communities can take advantage of federal funding for school feeding programs. There's money there that's flagged for feeding kids but the schools need to have programs in place. So we're going from state to state to encourage schools to take advantage of these programs. Detroit, Michigan: Jeff, You are truly a great actor! I watch your film "The Mirror Has Two Faces" literally every night and am in love with the fallable professor! I was wondering if you do alot of voice over work on commercials because I swear I hear you on tv all the time? Courtney  Jeff Bridges: I've done several commercials and I've done voiceovers for documentaries. Comment from Jeff Bridges: Looks like I'm out of time, it was wonderful chatting to everyone. Sorry I couldn't get to all the questions but stop by my website, www.jeffbridges.com and find out what I'm up to, thanks for all the cool questions. Kim Basinger vs Alec Baldwin: i due ex coniugi in tribunale Kim Basinger ed Alec Baldwin, un matrimonio, un divorzio e d'ora, finalmente, anche un accordo dopo un'aspra battaglia legale per l'affidamento della figlia di otto anni. la bambina vivrà con la madre e potrà passare del tempo con il padre ogni terzo fine settimana del mese. I compleanni e le feste comandate verranno suddivise equamente tra i due genitori ed Alec, che ha comprato una casa a Los Angeles per stare più vicino alla figlia, dovrà essere messo al corrente su tutto cio' che riguarda la salute e l'educazione della piccola. Inoltre, Kim ha dovuto mettere una linea aperta sul telefono della cucina per le chiamate d'emergenza in modo che l'ex-marito possa accorrere il più presto possibile in caso di necessità. I giudici sembrano aver fatto un buon lavoro... speriamo che adesso i due genitori continuino su questa buona strada! Kim Basingers neuer Film: Tote Elvis-Typen pflastern ihren Weg - München (dpa) - Hollywood-Star Kim Basinger (39) setzt in ihrem jüngsten Film «Elvis Has Left The Building» auf Komik statt auf Erotik oder Drama. Regisseur Joel Zwick («My Big Fat Greek Wedding») hat in den USA gerade die Dreharbeiten mit der Oscar-Preisträgerin und etlichen Elvis-Imitatoren beendet, teilte die an der Produktion beteiligte Firma Equity Pictures in München mit. Die schräge Komödie mit viel schwarzem Humor soll Mitte nächsten Jahres in die Kinos kommen. In dem Film spielt Basinger die Kosmetik-Beraterin Harmony. Sie ist geprägt durch ein frühkindliches Elvis-Trauma und wird zum unfreiwilligen Todesengel für Elvis-Nachahmer, denen Regisseur Zwick absurd-skurrile Todesarten beschert. Kim Basinger wurde mit dem Erotikstreifen «9 1/2 Wochen» (1986) berühmt. Für ihre dramatische Rolle in dem Thriller «L.A. Confidential» erhielt sie 1998 einen Oscar. Hollywood, l’invasione delle ultrabionde - Attrici platinate, anche per contratto. «Il modello è sempre Marilyn Monroe». Rassegne sulle dive ossigenate, ieri e oggi. LOS ANGELES - «Gli uomini preferiscono le bionde», raccontava nel 1953 Howard Hawks: e anche nel 2004 sono platinate (molte per contratto) le stelle emergenti di Hollywood. Così come le veterane: riecco Kim Basinger e Jessica Lange, sono in arrivo le cattive Sharon Stone (in «Catwoman») e Meryl Streep (in «The Manchurian Candidate»). Sarà bionda e a passo di danza anche Jennifer Lopez in Shall We Dance? con Richard Gere e la collega «in tinta» Susan Sarandon. Ha i capelli del colore di quelli di Doris Day pure Hilary Duff, ultima Cenerentola in The Cinderella Story . Tutte le mamme vanno a vedere le bionde adolescenti in Mean Girls ritrovando i loro problemi quando le figlie cominciano, sin da bambine, a schiarirsi i capelli di nascosto con la camomilla per assomigliare alla reginetta della scuola.   Celebrano le bionde del cinema, dal passato al presente: una grande retrospettiva dell'American Film Institute, un omaggio a Kim Novak all'Egyptian Theatre dell'American Cinematheque, una mostra-vendita all'asta al Rockefeller Plaza di New York di Christie's che ha visto andare a ruba cimeli appartenuti alla Monroe (un accappatoio rosa), a Marlene Dietrich (rossetti e piumini di cipria), a Madonna (bigiotteria) e persino alla «più bionda delle bionde» Jean Harlow (parrucche).  Mentre in Italia è sugli schermi Una bionda in carriera 2 con Reese Witherspoon, al Moca Museum di Los Angeles (Museum of Contemporary Art) un libro e una mostra dedicati all’illustratore Gil Elvren, «l'artista delle pin up»,riporta in auge tutte le figurine e le attrici dei suoi cartelloni con le bionde in reggicalze, in vestaglie di seta mentre preparano le altrettanto dorate torte di mele. Ogni mese va a ruba la rivista «Femme Fatale», che, invariabilmente, ha una bionda come bandiera: questo mese è toccato a Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in «The Punisher».  CATEGORIA - Sono bionde, come detto, quasi tutte le giovani attrici rampanti o già affermate e ne sarebbe contento sir Alfred Hitchcock, che certo ha concorso all'affermazione della categoria con Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly e altre «leading lady». Le trentenni Drew Barrymore e Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman, Jodie Foster, Naomi Watts, Helen Hunt, Meg Ryan cedono il passo alle nuove arrivate color miele e Kirsten Dunst in L'uomo ragno 2 è ormai la nuova fidanzata d'America mentre l'attrice francese più amata dal cinema, dalla critica e dal pubblico americano è la francesina bionda Julie Delpy, che in «Before Sunset» sta ottenendo un grande successo. Dalla prossima settimana, con l'uscita sugli schermi di Anchorman con Will Ferrell, un'altra bionda, Christina Applegate, dimostrerà che, dal passato al presente, anche sul piccolo schermo (basta pensare all' intrattenitrice del più seguito show tv, Kelly Ripa), le bionde dominano in tv, nei gossip, nelle mode (come le sorelle Paris e Nicky Hilton o Jessica e Ashlee Simpson).  EREDITIERE - La dice lunga una commedia di successo al box office: White Chicks in cui i due fratelli di colore, Marlon e Shawn Wayans si travestono da bionde pin-up . Devono salvare da un sequestro due bionde ereditiere. Sophie Piper De LaCour, direttrice della mostra-asta «Memorabilia Entertainment» di Christie's, dichiara: «Oggi le nuove attrici continuano a cercare di assomigliare a Marilyn, a cominciare da Scarlett Johansson». E' bionda anche l'ultima arrivata Rachel McAdams in «The Notebook» di Nick Cassavetes, il figlio del grande regista John che elesse a propria musa la bionda moglie Gena Rowlands. Hanno tutte le tonalità del biondo Kate Bosworth, la fidanzata nella vita di Orlando Bloom, Kate Hudson, Cloe Sevigny, Alicia Silverstone, Heather Locklear, la bambina prodigio Dakota Fanning, Diana Kruger-Elena di Troia... Chi non è «legalmente» bionda (Mira Sorvino) lo diventa.  STORIA - Dice Jean Picker, alla guida dell'American Film Institute: «Il cinema hollywoodiano racconta la sua storia, il suo glamour attraverso la galleria delle bionde della mostra. Da Lana Turner in poi, non sempre il biondo ha garantito serenità pari al successo». Lo ha confessato anche Kim Novak: «Dovevo essere bionda, per contratto. In tutti gli studios». Sherry Lansing, al timone della Paramount: «The Stepford Wives , con le bionde in parata, dalla Kidman a Glenn Close, racconta molte cose del lungo romanzo che il cinema e il costume hollywoodiani hanno avuto con le bionde, da Sandra Dee in Scandalo al sole alle commedie per teenagers di oggi».
	14  luglio: Oggi negli USA esce THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR! Un po' di news! THEATER COUNT: 1 - I, Robot Fox 3,400 - 1  2 - A Cinderella Story Warner Bros. 2,600+ - 1  3 19 The Clearing Fox Searchlight 400+ +139 3  4 34 De-Lovely United Artists 190 +166 3  5 24 Napoleon Dynamite Fox Searchlight 190+ +49 6  6 29 Before Sunset Warner Independent Pictures 130+ +67 3  7 - The Door in the Floor Focus 47 on Wed - 1  8 - Touch of Pink Sony Classics 8 (LA, NYC) - 1  9 - Maria Full of Grace Fine Line 7 - 1  10 - Zhou Yu's Train Sony Classics 7 (LA, NYC) - 1  Writer/director Tod Williams' debut, a dramedy called The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, evoked many comparisons to novelist John Irving. It was a coming of age story that felt literary even though the screenplay was original; it dealt with deteriorating family bonds with odd elements like a cross-dressing dad; it just had that Irving feel. No surprise, therefore, that for his second movie, Williams has chosen to adapt an actual Irving novel, A Widow for One Year. More precisely, he has adapted just the lengthy book's first third, which does stand alone as a complete story unto itself. If you've read the book, you might think of The Door in the Floor as just A Widow for One Summer. Meet Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a failed writer of adult books and a successful writer of children's books. Ted parades around his Long Island mansion in the nude, plays squash in a caftan, and burns though a series of mistresses (including Mimi Rogers) that he draws in the nude, in progressively more degrading poses. Lacking any sense of boundaries, he'll even hit on a mother and a daughter simultaneously. Yet somehow, this hedonist is a family man who cares for his emotionally frozen wife Marion (Kim Basinger) and dotes on his five-year-old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning). His work has a reputation for perspicacious insight into children's hopes and, especially, fears. A horrible tragedy lurks in Ted and Marion's past. They have lost their two teenaged sons, and are each dealing (or better, not dealing) with it in their own way. Ruth, born after the death of her older brothers, is a failed attempt to erase their grief. She has absorbed the unhealthy morbidity permeating the house, and reflects it back with an obsessive-compulsive disorder focused on the shrine of photographs of her brothers. She studies them every day, and can't bear to have a single one out of place, while her parents encourage her fetishistic fascination. The Cole household is dead, but obsessed with recalling a time when it was alive. Jeff Bridges proposes a trial separation to Kim Basinger in The Door in the Floor.  Ted comes up with a couple harebrained ideas about how to shake his wife out of her emotional stupor. He suggests a trial separation for the summer. Marion will spend her nights in the small apartment in town that Ted uses as his office, but since he must work there, she'll have to go back to the mansion during the day. Ted also decides bring a new face into this poisonous atmosphere, giving a summer job to a kid hoping to learn about writing. That kid turns out to be Eddie (Jon Foster).  The first thing you notice about Eddie is that he and Ted have the same name. Since this story is a work of fiction, their names have been specifically chosen. Therefore, the parallel is not a coincidence. Even more suspicious, Eddie's duties are vague. Ted pretends to give him editing assignments and other errands involving squid ink, but he doesn't really have anything for Eddie to do beyond acting as chauffeur. So it seems, anyway.  Eddie doesn't care to interact with Ruth's nanny Alice (Bijou Phillips) or the young people hanging out at the beach. Instead he develops his own obsession. Marion's photographs and clothes become catalysts for his masturbatory fantasies. When Marion finds out, she lays out clothes for him to fantasize about, and eventually a sexual relationship develops—an weird, incestuous relationship that Williams portrays explicitly, including a totally nude scene between young Jon Foster and fifty-one year-old (if you can believe it) Kim Basinger. An obvious part of Eddie's appeal is that he reminds Marion of her sons. Before their first liaison, Marion wonders if her children had experienced sex before they died. Soon Marion is smiling for the first time since the tragedy, and Ted notices. He has manipulated this entire situation, of course, though his goals are open to interpretation. Ted's most famous children's book is called The Door in the Floor. At one point Ted reads the unsettling story aloud in its entirety. “The little boy was afraid of what was under the door in the floor, and the mommy was afraid, too. Once, long ago, other children had come to visit the cabin for Christmas, but the children had opened the door in the floor and they had disappeared down the hole,” the story reads in part. Though a college student is convinced the door represents a vagina, the tale is obviously a metaphor for Ted and Marion's loss. The illustrations we see in the film are Bridges' own work, as is the other artwork, with the exception of the life drawings of Mimi Rogers. The photography's rich but muted colors match the tone of the film. The first frames of the film are out of focus, just like the characters, who come into focus only gradually. Bridges, a consistently under-appreciated actor, does arguably the best work of his career in The Door in the Floor, integrating extreme behavior, questionable actions, and strong force of will into a cohesive individual with a rich emotional life. There are not many other actors who could humanize a guy like Ted. Basinger, as a walled off but fragile woman in grief, gives the first performance since winning her Oscar that suggests she is worthy of the statuette. A touching, wordless scene between Basinger and Bridges late in the film, in which everything is communicated through their eyes, is a masterpiece of acting. Then there's Elle Fanning, even more of a preternatural old soul than her elder sister Dakota and possibly just as talented. To put it bluntly, she will freak you out. At one point Irving and Williams speak directly to the audience through Ted, as he lectures Eddie on writing. He observes, “Pain, betrayal, even death. Everything in fiction is a tool.” Certainly, this is true. A tool for what, though? What, if anything, does Irving's story mean, or tell us about ourselves? This quiet, ambiguous, European-style film may surprise you by how long it stays with you, challenging you to answer that question. It might just prompt you to seek out the novel, to learn where Ruth and Eddie end up as adults. Basinger looks forward to a more peaceful life - 'God and a sense of humor mean a lot to me in my life. Believe me, I spend a lot of time on my knees, I do," drawls Kim Basinger.  She's talking about her divorce from Alec Baldwin, their bitter custody battle and the last two years of her life, where her nightly prayer was simple.  "I'd get down on my knees and say, 'God, when is this going to be over?'" says the 50-year-old actress.  It's noon at L'Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills and for the first time since her split with Baldwin, the shy half of their duo has decided to talk about her life.  Basinger also has a new movie to talk about, "The Door in the Floor," which opens Wednesday. She plays a woman coping with her marriage and life falling apart. It's hard not to draw parallels.  "It's publicly known that I went through a divorce. I didn't want it to become public," she says with a sigh. "But the divorce has been splashed out in the pages of every newspaper and tabloid.  "What people don't realize is that hurt is involved. There's an emotional range that no one in the world could ever understand in a million years unless you've gone there."  With a somewhat spiritual resolve, she doesn't lay blame anywhere.  "You know what? I made my choices in life with free will. Now all I can quote is my favorite childlike line which is, 'God makes lemonade out of lemons.' I got my daughter Ireland from the choices I made. So, I got my lemonade. She's a gift from God."  She dubs the actual divorce from Baldwin "a horrible battle, but we've gotten through it."  Basinger is getting some of the best reviews of her career and there's Oscar talk about her role as Marion in "The Door in the Floor." She plays an East Hampton mother, who faces the unthinkable when her teenage sons are both killed in a freak accident.  Marion withdraws into her own pain, pulls away from her husband (Jeff Bridges) and leaves her young daughter to fend for herself. The only person who brings her to life -- and how -- is a summer helper (Jon Foster), who has the hots for her. He's only 17, but Marion seduces him in order to get some kind of grasp on life.  It's "Summer of '42" time from there on out, except more explicit.  "I couldn't have asked for a better person than Jon to do these scenes with me," Basinger insists. "He's an angel and a beautiful human being." She laughs about their constant nudity in the film and whoops, "The poor boy has a girlfriend. I think he called her about 100 times a day!"  The tables turned for the more mature Basinger during the sex scenes. "All through my career, usually it's the guy who is taking care of me during the take. But I found myself taking care of Jon and asking if he felt comfortable. It was very cute."  From the start, Basinger never planned on getting so hot and heavy. "I honestly said I couldn't do it," she frets when explaining how she nearly passed on the film. "I loved the piece, but I just had a back operation a few months before the offer came in, and I knew the physical requirements."  Yet, Basinger met newbie director Kip Williams, who had already axed Madonna, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver and a host of other middle-age babes from his wish list to play Marion.  "It broke my heart because I met Kip and I just loved him to pieces," Basinger says. "Plus, I loved the script and you know how many scripts actors just have to endure. So, when you get a piece like this one with these words ... well, gosh."  "[Marion] was someone that just said, 'You know me.'" Basinger says. "I guess I was at that time in my life where I could understand her silence and aloneness."  It was at a time when her divorce was heating up and all the custody issues were looming. "The movie was a godsend," she says.  But the movie didn't mend her life; it was her daughter who did that.  "I think that once you become a mother, your heart is no longer yours," she says. "All I know is that my daughter is the greatest thing I'll ever do in my life. That's why this movie hit home, too. Jeff Bridges and I would walk around the set saying, 'Isn't your greatest fear in life something happening to your child?' I mean -- there are just no words."  Ireland Baldwin will be 9 this October. She will live primarily with Basinger but will see her father.  "I'm a single mother now on this journey with my daughter," Basinger says. "We've obviously had a loss, and now the goal is to have a physically, emotionally and mentally happy child. All of those things are under my umbrella when I'm on my own with my daughter.  "I'm vulnerable in many ways," she admits. "But I've grown away from being nervous and self-conscious or whatever. I guess you just have to drop your own agenda when you become a mother.  "I've grown more in the last four years than I can say," she says. "In fact, I can't even keep up with myself. I'll turn around and know something that I didn't think that I knew and be talking about it or talking to other women about it"  "It's about coming into your own game and finding your own strengths."  At home outside Los Angeles, Basinger tends to Ireland and also pursues watercolor painting and writes children's books. She also takes care of the 21 animals on her property. Forget Ireland following in her parents' footsteps.  "She wants to be a veterinarian," Basinger says.  The proud mother, who turned 50 in December, has two new movies in the can -- "Elvis Has Left the Building" and this fall's "Cellular."  Unlike other women in Hollywood, Basinger isn't obsessed with her looks.  "Women are pounded over the head with this idea of turning 50," she says. "My attitude is I can't wait to see what's up the road. There's a looseness and letting go that comes with 50 that I welcome.  "I've let go of bad feelings, anger and anything else that can destroy you."  Basinger also let go of control on the big day.  "I turned 50 sitting in my favorite chair and watching my daughter take over my birthday. She has all these little rituals she does with the cake. It was everything to me."  The Door in the Floor - NEW YORK (CNS) -- The disquieting drama "The Door in the Floor" (Focus) grapples to understand and illuminate the consequences of grief on a marriage but fails to resonate on an emotional level as selfish characters remain remote and abrasive. And an affair between a married woman and a teenage boy is disconcerting not just because it takes advantage of a naif, but in this case it also represents the treatment of a person as an object to be used up and discarded. Based on the John Irving novel, "A Widow for One Year," the film features an admirable performance by Jeff Bridges as egocentric -- and eccentric -- children's book author Ted Cole. In the posh Hamptons of New York for the summer, Ted and his emotionally damaged wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), are coping with the overbearing grief of having lost their two teenage sons years before. The strain has become too much to bear, and Ted has asked for a "temporary separation," with each of them alternately spending the night in an apartment in town and their beach house. Their young daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), clearly feels the effects of her parents' anguish, eating only grilled cheese and ketchup and obsessing over the photos of the brothers she never met hung in shrine-like fashion down a long hallway of the house. Into this dysfunctional situation enters Eddie (Jon Foster), a high-school junior whom Ted has hired as his summer assistant. Idolizing Ted, eager to please and an aspiring author himself, Eddie at first ignores the strangeness of the family in hopes of gleaning any pearls of writing wisdom from Ted. But he soon realizes that he has been taken on mainly to drive Ted to his mistress (Mimi Rogers), which affords Eddie plenty of time to observe and ultimately become infatuated with Marion. She is beautiful, and her pain seems to be a mysterious attraction for him. This adolescent puppy love is met with Marion's need to somehow heal her sorrowful heart and the two engage in a sexual relationship. For Marion, the connection is a form of grief therapy, as evidenced by a particular scene in which she and Eddie make love with Marion, tears in her eyes, transfixed by a picture of her teenage sons. Writer-director Tod Williams has chosen to show this affair in explicit detail, leaving nothing to the imagination. However, the effect is the opposite of the supposed intention. Instead of viewing the characters' naked bodies as a metaphor for their emotional vulnerabilities, it comes across as two people using each other for their own selfish purposes, in spite of Eddie's eventual affection for Marion. Even with all these emotionally charged circumstances bubbling beneath the surface, the drama remains superficial. The pained characters do not elicit the viewer's sympathy because their decisions emanate from purely selfish motives. Neither Ted nor Marion put their daughter, Ruth, first, thinking of how their actions will affect her. Ted is almost lecherous as his treatment of his mistress evolves from seduction to passion to degradation. (Bridges nails his pathetic character, making the viewer hate him, then feel sorry for him and ultimately be disgusted by him.) While Marion uses Eddie as a balm for her aching wounds, Ted claims that Eddie was his "gift" to Marion. And throughout this turbulent summer, Ruth slips through the cracks. The final reel is a leap of faith, as the action moves quickly and the audience must assume that Eddie and Marion's relationship has jumped to the next level, although it is never quite believable. The decisions made by Ted and Marion do not show a growth in character but instead reiterate their self-centered view on life. As the distant Marion, Basinger only scratches the surface. An ethereal beauty with flowing blonde locks and a far-off look, she is physically every young man's dream. But Basinger keeps this grieving mother emotionally remote, showing only her sadness but not the love she had for her sons. Foster, on the other hand, is natural and believable as a teenager caught in an adult world for which he is unprepared. Williams keeps the audience hooked with the mystery surrounding the boys' death for as long as possible -- maybe even too long. But moody atmospherics and a few tender moments cannot compensate for what is overall an off-putting story about selfishness and sordid relationships. Because of a sexual relationship with a minor, extramarital affairs, a few graphic sexual situations and images, frontal nudity, and intermittent profanity and rough language, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted. The Door in the Floor Release Date: July 2, 2004 Starring: Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster Directed by: Tod Williams GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW - Many of the films adapted from John Irving’s novels have an oddly bland feel to them, even as they depict the most outrageous flourishes of Irving’s imagination. I mean, I liked the film of The World According to Garp pretty well, but when it came to the depiction of the self-mutilating Ellen Jamesians and such, it didn’t really go there. And as affecting as much of Miramax’s adaptation of The Cider House Rules was (Lasse Hallström’s director’s credit notwithstanding, the picture felt like a studio creation), its high-gloss veneer prevented it from ever connecting at a gut level. There are more than a couple of moments in this film, adapted by writer-director Tod Williams from a big swatch of Irving’s multigenerational quilt A Widow for One Year, that get Irving’s sense of grotesque tragedy and tragic grotesquerie just right. A particularly mortifying one arrives when Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges, superb as he’s ever been), a grizzled, idiosyncratic children’s book writer, is fleeing from a scorned woman he’s been, um, drawing, and one of the more unflattering portraits of her that she’s been throwing around ends up on the windshield of the Waspy mother-daughter Samaritans who are helping him make his escape. You have to see it, although you’ll likely cringe. That’s the point. Williams, who debuted with the promising indie The Adventures of Sebastian Cole (no relation to the protagonist here), handles all of the elements of the story, which at first seems to be about the disintegration of a marriage (Kim Basinger is wonderful as Cole’s deeply sad wife, who is drawn to her husband’s eager-beaver summer assistant, played well by Jon Foster) but turns out to be about something much bigger and more terrible, with an equally sure hand. Nonetheless, Door doesn’t ever seem to cohere while it’s onscreen; my viewing companion and I came out of the screening with a “what was going on with that?” feeling. But we were still talking about the movie days later. Adapting John Irving novels to the screen is a tricky bit of business. - When the elements come together successfully, the results can take the generally pleasing forms of "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules" (for which Irving himself handled screenplay honors). When they don't, you're stuck with the lumpy "Hotel New Hampshire" or the treacly "Simon Birch," which was loosely based on Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany." Breaking the tie, "The Door in the Floor" -- taking its cue from the first part of Irving's "A Widow for One Year" -- falls satisfyingly into the plus category. A tragicomic rumination on life and death and love and sex (but not necessarily in that order), the production is graced by bold performances, lyrical visuals and, most notably, Irving's own words, which have made the transition quite intact thanks to a faithful but still filmic adaptation by writer-director Tod Williams. With its tragic emotional underpinnings and complex characters, the Focus Features release would have seemed more at home in the fall release schedule rather than taking on potential blockbusters like "I, Robot" and "King Arthur," but the counterprogramming gambit could work in the picture's favor, giving it a neat jump on all those upcoming awards hopefuls. As with the earlier section of Irving's 576-page novel, "Door" chronicles a fateful summer in the splintering lives of an East Hampton couple still struggling to cope with the tragic deaths of their two sons. While free-spirited Ted Cole (a terrific Jeff Bridges), a successful children's author and illustrator, has seemingly moved on from the mourning process by indulging his weakness for infidelity, his wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), remains in a troubling state of withdrawal. The pallor over their seaside household has forced their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's equally capable little sister), to grow up fast.  But a coastal disturbance soon arrives in the form of Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a young man who's ostensibly hired on as Ted's intern but quickly develops a major crush on Marion. Much to his surprise, his feverish sexual yearning is reciprocated, though their steamy affair doesn't exactly lead to a tidy emotional recovery for the damaged family unit. Williams, who made his feature debut with "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" and is working on a remake of "To Have and Have Not" for Benicio Del Toro, does a careful job of extracting and reshaping the Irving material, never shying away from the book's more overtly sexual elements, without detracting from the film's own separate identity. Key to that success is a strong ensemble playing flawed characters that essentially dare the audience to like them.  The fundamentally likable Bridges gamely pushes all that goodwill to the far edge as the unorthodox Ted, logging one of his best performances in the process.  Basinger, meanwhile, who shared the screen with Bridges in Robert Benton's "Nadine," really immerses herself into her character's complex layers with similarly impressive results. Also doing gutsy work is Mimi Rogers, who has been given very little to hide behind as the needy, hot-blooded object of Bridges' daytime affections. Behind the camera, cinematographer Terry Stacey ("American Splendor") is responsible for some truly lovely compositions, movingly underscored by Marcelo Zarvos' eloquent music. Open-and-shut: John Irving likes "Door" film adaptation - FOCUS FEATURES In "The Door in the Floor," based on John Irving's "A Widow for One Year," Jon Foster becomes a pawn in a troubled marriage.  "You have to put your expectations in some other place when you watch a film (and you've already read the book). It will never be the same as the book. NEVER!" reads one posting by a member of the online group "John Irving is God."  Perhaps. But "The Door in the Floor," opening nationwide tomorrow, comes pretty close to the Irving book it's based on — or at least to the first 200 pages.  To Irving, the adaptation of his dense and lengthy novel, "A Widow for One Year," is "word for word, the most faithful translation of any of my books to film." Even more faithful, he says, than his own Oscar-winning adaptation of "The Cider House Rules."  Director Tod Williams did the honors this time, choosing only one of the book's three parts for his screenplay. The movie unfolds over the course of a summer, when Ruth Cole is 4. Her father, played by Jeff Bridges, is a famous children's book author and rakish philanderer. Her mother, Kim Basinger, despondent over the loss of their two sons, is distracted from her grief by the prep-school boy her husband hires as his assistant.  It's the fifth Irving novel to be made into a film. Irving seems to have come to terms with those early films — "The World According to Garp," "The Hotel New Hampshire" and "Simon Birch," which deviated so far from "A Prayer for Owen Meany" that he is said to have asked that the film's title be changed. But it wasn't until "The Cider House Rules" that he began to embrace Hollywood.  "I'm not a moviegoer, having seen only two movies in a movie theater in the last 10 years," writes Irving in "My Movie Business," his 1999 memoir about adapting "The Cider House Rules." Those films — "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient" — he watched only because he was told they were better than the books. He disagreed.  Has Irving since seen any films better than their novel counterparts?  "I've seen many, but they don't come from very good books," he says.  "Which is why it's much riskier to go after a good book," says director Williams, "and something I would typically want to avoid."  He needn't have worried; Irving is delighted by his approach.  "Not only do readers ... feel that they're really back in the territory of the book," Irving says, "but even better, from my perspective, is that for people who see this movie and don't know the book, Acts II and III are perfectly intact."  Whether fans will agree is uncertain. Those who know the book may find the movie abrupt — and be startled when the credits roll after so small a slice of the story.  But Irving gives the final product his glowing endorsement: "Without qualification, the two best films made from novels of mine are 'The Cider House Rules' and this one, 'The Door in the Floor.' "  This is unusual in the adaptation business, says Howard Rodman, chairman of the writing division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema. "For an author to be happy with the movie ... is a very rare and wonderful thing."  Says fan Gary Norris, "If Irving's OK with it, then I'm OK with it." A Seattle archivist and librarian, he has more than 130 copies of "The World According to Garp."  Next, Irving and Williams are considering a film version of Irving's most recent novel, "The Fourth Hand."  THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR - Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten Grade: A- Focus Features Directed by: Tod Williams Written by: Tod Williams, based on novel "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving Cast: Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Eddie Cole, Mimi Rogers, Elle Fanning, Bijou Phillips Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 5/19/04 Elementary school teachers welcome the first day of school following the obligatory two-months’ recess by asking the youngsters to describe “what I did on my summer vacation.” Too bad this is not customary in high school, because what  Eddie O’Hare could tell his class on the first day of his senior year would knock off even the jaded socks of his presumably preppy “nothing-shocks-us” class at the Exeter School. “The Door in the Floor,” the title derived from a celebrated children’s book by Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), is a useful nomenclature for both the metaphoric meaning described in a young woman’s term paper about the author, and a delightful final moment of the film that makes one guess (and hope) that a sequel will be forthcoming.  The story is seen from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old aspiring writer, Eddie–a young man who in one summer is transformed from a naif to a sexually initiated and ultimately matured preppie on a summer internship. “The Door in the Floor” opens on a wistful and spirited four-year-old, Ruth (Elle Fanning, the five-year-old sister of Dakota) whose fixation on a picture of her two brothers introduces us to an accident that has taken their lives and has had a profound effect on her parents’ marriage. Marion Cole (Kim Basinger) blames her husband for the tragedy and has becomes almost comatose, brought to life by the young intern who was hired to drive the license-challenged Ted to his assignations and beyond, but who may have been given the job as either a gift to Ted’s now-estranged wife or, more cynically, a means of gaining custody of the little girl.  Young Eddie’s reluctance to date Ruth’s teen nanny, Alice (Bijou Phillips) is fortuitous, leading to the lad’s seduction by the unhappy Marion, whose husband’s meanderings about the population of East Hampton women (first using them as models, then seducing and tiring of them) may or may not have led to his wife’s estrangement. Sexuality is an important undercurrent throughout the story, featuring hedonistic Ted Cole’s strutting about the grounds naked coupled with a few frank shots of Alice’s goings-on with the summer’s chauffeur. You can’t be blamed if you see similarities in tone between this film and Ang Lee’s equally riveting “The Ice Storm”–an adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about a real-life ice storm in 1973 and how it parallels activities in upscale New Canaan, Connecticut. Tod Williams, whose “The Door in the Floor” is the writer-director’s adaptation of the first one-third of John Irving’s novel, “A Widow for One Year,” captures the author’s tone in every way, via strong performances from the entire cast, Terry Stacey’s photography largely on location in East Hampton--the sunlit beauty of the beach, flora and fauna contrasting ironically with the somber feelings of the participants. Jeff Bridges, one of the most hirsute fellows around for a guy of fifty-five, comfortably inhabits the role of a writer whose relationships with the entire town’s women lends notes of considerable humor to such a carefully-paced story, particularly when running for his life from a women disposed to kill him first with a knife and then with her vehicle. If this story is adapted from only the first one-third of John Irving’s novel, can you imagine what a terrific read the remainder must be? On Movies | Bridges' only crises are on the screen By Steven Rea Inquirer Columnist In The Door in the Floor, Jeff Bridges plays a kid-lit auteur who ambles around his fancy house naked, makes grand pronouncements about art and literature, and carries on affairs while his wife (Kim Basinger) is rocked to the core by family tragedy. Bridges' Ted Cole is a character created by John Irving for his novel A Widow for One Year; the film is adapted from the first third of the book. Bridges' character is a man in a classic midlife crisis. Which is something the actor is definitely not. "I'm not sure what the definition of midlife crisis is, exactly," says Bridges, who is 54 and has made close to that number of movies. "You hit a certain age and you start to ask yourself, 'Am I fulfilled?' " Some typical signs, he is told: middle-aged guys zooming around in pricey sports cars; jettisoning their wives for women half their age. "Well, I certainly have none of those impulses," he responds, seated sideways on a couch in a hotel room the other day. "I had my race car, my sports car, my motorcycle, as a kid, and I'd just as soon not do that anymore. And I have a wonderful marriage. I've been married for 27 years and it keeps getting better and better." So the youngest son of the late Lloyd Bridges gets his midlife crises - and a lot of other heavy emotional stuff - out on-screen. "One of the great things about acting is that you get to inhabit these other lives, and experience things through these [roles]. Maybe that takes the edge off that midlife-crisis thing for me." A laid-back Californian who lives 90 miles up the coast from Hollywood in Santa Barbara, Bridges chooses his roles carefully. He accepted The Door in the Floor for a couple of reasons: He already had a relationship with author Irving (the two are developing another of his novels, A Son of the Circus), and he liked the young writer-director Tod Williams' confident take on adapting A Widow for One Year (well, a chunk of it). Floor, rated R, opens Wednesday at the Ritz Theaters. In the film, Basinger's character emerges from a deep depression when her husband brings a prep schooler home as a summer intern. The boy (Jon Foster) begins a relationship with the wife, and all sorts of messiness - tragic, farcical, sexual - ensues. Bridges, who played opposite Basinger once before, in the offbeat 1987 romance Nadine, has often worked for untested filmmakers. Floor's Williams had made only one film, the low-budget 1999 Adventures of Sebastian Cole. The picture that Bridges wrapped last week, The Moguls, is a tale of suburbanites banding together to make a sex film. ("It's Frank Capra goes porno," is Bridges' sound bite.) Its helmer, MichaelTraeger, is making his directing debut. "Usually, the independent films are the ones that the first-time guys can go after, and those are usually the more interesting, riskier kind of scripts," he explains. "They're the kinds of things that I'm most often drawn to." Bridges' instincts have served him well: Steve Kloves was a newcomer when Bridges (and his older brother, Beau) made The Fabulous Baker Boys; Robert Bentonwas green when Bridges agreed to star in Bad Company. The actor, who headed Seabiscuit last year, has worked with a long list of established filmmakers, too: Terry Gilliam'sThe Fisher King (1991), John Carpenter's Starman (1984), which landed Bridges a best-actor Oscar nomination. Bridges has worked for John Huston (Fat City) and Francis Ford Coppola (in the title role of Tucker: The Man and His Dream). "I have a funny kind of process," says Bridges, explaining the way he sifts through the screenplays that arrive at his door. "Most of my energy is put into resisting [a project]... . One of the tests I give myself is to say how would you feel if you didn't do this movie? And if I get to a place where I'm thinking about a project and I say, 'Gee, I would feel terrible if I didn't do it,' then that's the one." For The Door in the Floor, Bridges drew the dark but playful illustrations that appear in his character's books. He has painted for many years, and he's serious about photography. Pictures, a collection of pictures taken on movie sets over the years, was published last fall by PowerHouse Books. On Saturday, an exhibition of his photos opens at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.; the show travels to San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts in November. A few years ago, Bridges recorded (with, among others, Michael McDonald and David Crosby), Be Here Soon - an album of songs, most of which the actor wrote. (Sample titles: "She Lay Her Whip Down," "Buddha and Christ at Large.") It's available on Ramp Records. It wasn't until well into his film career that he finally came to terms with the notion that acting was what he was going to pursue first and foremost. "I had maybe done about 12 movies," he recalls, "and I remember it was a [1973] movie called The Last American Hero, a race-car movie, about Junior Johnson, based on his life. And usually after a movie - and I still go through this now - I feel, 'Oh, I don't ever want to do that again!' It's just exhausting. It's like after you've run a big race and somebody says, 'Come on, let's run over here!' You don't ever want to run again... . "But in this instance, I'd just finished Last American Hero, and about a week after it wrapped I got a call from my agent, and he said I'd been offered a role inJohn Frankenheimer's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Frankenheimer is going to direct, Robert Ryan, Fredric March, Lee Marvin - and I said, 'No, I'm going to pass, I'm too bushed.'... "About five minutes later Lamont Johnson, who directed Last American Hero, called me up and read me the riot act. 'You call yourself an actor?! Here are all these great masters you have a chance to work with and you say no?!' and he hung up on me!" So Bridges decided to test himself, to see if he could figure out what he really wanted. "I had a lot of early success with The Last Picture Show [1971], but I still had music ideas and art ideas and things like that, and so I said to myself, 'I understand the word professional - that means that you have to do it sometimes when you don't feel like it. Well, I certainly don't feel like it, but... ." Bridges called his agent back and said he would take the job. "It was a big, long project with a lot of big speeches, so I threw myself into it, and it was an amazing experience. It was eight weeks of hanging around with all of these great actors, and I had a great time, and I said, 'Well, this is something I can do for the rest of my life.' " And he has. Not that anchorman. Adam McKay, who hails originally from Malvern and attended Temple in the late '80s, says local TV news god Larry Kanedid not serve as the basis for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - despite reports to the contrary. McKay, who directed the just-released farce and cowrote it with his former Saturday Night Live colleague (and big-deal movie star) Will Ferrell, says his target was far more general. "Ron Burgundy is such a cartoonish character. He's an amalgam of all the worst vain aspects of that job. Larry Kane's very serious, he actually fancies himself a journalist... I felt bad for the guy." That said, TV news folks who have seen the set-in-the-'70s sendup have not been happy. "There was a story in the New York Post with anchor people's reactions," McKay reports. "They were just so not amused. I think they want the movie to be like Network and Broadcast News, where even though you're satirizing it, you're still giving [the job] a lot of importance. "And we of course give it no importance at all. It's kind of like their worst nightmare." Older women taking off their clothes - Basinger, Rogers bare much in 'Door in the Floor' Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger in "The Door in the Floor," based on John Irving's "A Widow for One Year."  LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- Nudity is big this summer on the big screen. First, there is the whole Colin Farrell of it all with his new movie "A Home at the End of the World." Then there's the upcoming gratuitous Will Smith shower scene in "I, Robot."  And Wednesday, Focus Features' "The Door in the Floor" delivers a whole lot of bare-it-all scenes for a few members of its cast, most importantly Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers and Jeff Bridges. But leave the full-frontal to Rogers, 48, who plays the other woman to Bridges' character in the film based on a John Irving novel.  And while she admits it was "a little scary," once she worked out all the particulars with helmer Tod Williams, the clothes came right off. "When I met with Tod initially, we talked a lot about it, because the way that it's written, it comes at a time when the relationship (between their characters) is entering a darker, uglier phase," Rogers says.  "And I wanted to know how he saw it and how he intended to shoot it. It's not particularly objectionable to me, because it's not nudity in a sexual context per se because it's during an art scene and is more relevant to the storytelling as opposed to it being gratuitous, 'OK, now, here's the sex scene.' But it did require me to be there, full-on starkers as they say." Obviously, there's a lot more going on in the film than skin -- Rogers boasts that Bridges brings his best work, saying, "He deserves the Oscar for his performance in this movie, he's spectacular." But back to the bare facts.  "The thing that's cool about this movie is that Kim and I both have a lot of nudity -- two hot ladies over 40," Rogers says with a laugh. "We're going to set the industry on its ear, 'Don't forget about us, boys.' And Kim, she's like freakishly beautiful. It all helps reinforce the idea that age doesn't have that much to do with beauty. Over 40 is a state of mind." The power of the pen: Personal letter to author John Irving cinched deal for 'The Door in the Floor' In this impersonal world of voice mail and instant messaging, the best method of getting someone's attention is still the old-fashioned way: Writing a letter.  At least that's what filmmaker Tod Williams learned when he dropped a lengthy line to novelist John Irving about the possibility of turning Irving's book, "A Widow for One Year," into a movie that would end up being titled "The Door in the Floor."  "I worked very hard on that letter, explaining my idea for the movie, and sent it to John," says the soft-spoken, slow-talking Williams, 35, whose only previous film credit was writing and directing the little-seen "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole." "John invited me up to Vermont, and we met and quickly agreed that we were going to do something."  "The letter was good," recalls Irving, 62, speaking a little faster, a little gruffer than Williams, who is sitting next him. "The very fact that he wrote me a letter was so un-movie business, it appealed to me. Most people say, 'I have an idea of how you might make that a film.' Then they want to have breakfast or lunch or a meeting.  "But I don't do 'talk' very well, especially if somebody's saying to me that they have an idea of how to write a screenplay based on one of my novels. I want to see them write, right? And I said, 'Well, I don't know if he can do the film, but he can write a good letter. That's a start.' And from the first draft, any doubts I might have had were gone."  Irving had every right to have doubts. Although he's constantly praised director Lasse Hallstrom's 1999 film of his book "The Cider House Rules," for which Irving wrote the screenplay, he hasn't ever had much to say about other adaptations of his work. He's noted that Mark Steven Johnson, who made "Simon Birch" from Irving's novel, "A Prayer for Owen Meaney," was up front with him about proposed radical changes from the source material, and Irving OK'd it -- as long as the title was changed.  But the situation was different with two earlier films: George Roy Hill's version of "The World According to Garp" and Tony Richardson's take on "The Hotel New Hampshire."  "I feel pretty detached from those films," says Irving. "I never loved them, I never disliked them. Those were good experiences for me, but I was very removed from them, by choice. George asked me to write the screenplay for 'Garp,' and Tony asked me to write the screenplay for 'Hotel.' But I said, 'No thanks, I don't see them as movies. You go ahead.'"  He never saw the sprawling "A Widow for One Year" as a film either. The story arcs four decades in the life of little girl-turned writer Ruth Cole and her relationships with her father and the young man her father once took on as an assistant.  The book was split into three distinct sections. The film only focuses on the first part. Jeff Bridges plays the father, Kim Basinger is his troubled wife, little Elle Fanning is Ruth, and newcomer Jon Foster is the assistant, Eddie O'Hare. Irving liked having a film made out of only part of the book.  "When Kip came to me with this idea" -- he refers to him as Kip, even though, when asked, Williams says people call him Tod -- "it struck me as perfect from the beginning. And not only was the new title -- which we decided upon between us in five minutes -- sort of waiting for you at the end of the movie, it's so well interwoven into theof the film, my confidence in him kept growing and growing, with every draft I saw."  So how many drafts were there?  Williams sighs and says, "Hundreds," and draws the word out. "I don't know how to define a draft. You just keep writing until it's finished."  "I think that's my other fondness here," adds Irving. "Three-quarters of my life as a writer is revision. I love rewriting. And I could see that from Kip's capacity for tweaking something and then tweaking it again, and putting something in and taking something out, that he had that same instinct."  Irving doesn't have a writing credit on the film, but he certainly was a collaborator on the project.  "Even though I wasn't the writer on 'The Door in the Floor,' I feel that I gave Kip probably more than all the notes he wanted," says Irving, laughing. "I made as many reactions as I could, I saw the dailies. I felt, without qualification, that I was onboard in this film. In the case of 'Cider House,' I wrote that screenplay, and when you are the writer, you're a little more anxious. This was an easier commitment for me because he did all the work. I just kept responding to it."  Asked if there were any rules established for the adaptation process, Irving answers before Williams can.  "No rules," he says. "In the original letter, Kip told me why he wanted to begin where he begins, and why he wanted to end where he ended. We had a lot of conversations about what scenes from the first 183 pages of the novel interested him or didn't interest him. Writers think specifically. But people who pitch treatments don't.  "If I'd met with Kip and he said, 'Well, this to me is about the ways you deal with loss,' my head would have rolled off my shoulders, or something. I would have said, 'Well, what I want to know is: Is Mrs. Vaughn in the film or is she not in the film?'" he says of the lusty character played by Mimi Rogers.  As of right now, it looks like Irving and Williams will be working together on a future project -- an adaptation of Irving's 2001 novel "The Fourth Hand."  "Richard Gladstein is the producer, and Miramax is scheduled to make the film," says Irving, but he's not sure when. "Richard was the producer for 'Cider House,' he loves 'The Door in the Floor,' and he and I both like the idea of Tod" -- he finally calls him Tod -- "directing 'The Fourth Hand,' based on my screenplay.  "I think that would appeal to both of us," he adds, looking at Williams and laughing, "because we now feel we know each other and have gotten over each other's worst habits."  Williams smiles and says, "So it would be tolerable to do this again."  Peeling the onion - 'The Door in the Floor' star Jeff Bridges really knows how to sketch out a character  Much can change in 17 years. Kids grow, partners come and go. Oscars are won and lost. Towns are bought and sold.  But in the nearly two decades between their pairing in "Nadine" in 1987 and their on-screen reunion in "The Door in the Floor" opening this week, Kim Basinger has noticed one Gibralter-like constant about her two-time co-star, Jeff Bridges.  His onion.  "Jeff was crazy about rehearsal," Basinger recalls about the shooting of "Nadine," a modest caper comedy set in 1950s Texas. "He wanted to rehearse and rehearse. He wanted to put lines here and draw this out, and, 'Here's the room, and this is what we're going to do.' He refers to it as 'peeling his onion.' "  Basinger, 51, is sitting next to a not-so-sheepish Bridges as she talks about the onion. There seems to be a genuine affection between the two actors, although it's Basinger who does the majority of the teasing.  "I watched him peel that onion and peel that onion," Basinger continues. "(Director Robert) Benton and I would come up to him, 'Are you finished peeling the onion?' On this film, he gave me that phrase again. The way he studies this character, I sit there fascinated, but that's the difference in the way we work. I don't know if it's my impatience. I don't know what it is. I like the reactor part of acting, I think the listening part is as important as the talking. I don't even know what method it is I use."  Guilty as charged, says Bridges, the four-time Oscar-nominated actor. "I loved what we came up with in 'Nadine,' " he says. "It's like a magic trick, an illusion we're trying to pull off, and it really doesn't matter how you pull it off, as long as the illusion is there."  In "Door in the Floor," adapted by writer/director Tod Williams from the first third of John Irving's novel, "A Widow for One Year," the actors have very few scenes together. But both are playing very onion-able parts.  Ted Cole (Bridges) is a failed novelist turned successful children's book author/illustrator from the Hamptons whose marriage to Marion (Basinger) has chilled since the death of their two teenage sons in a car accident several years before. Now a boozing philanderer but a loving father to their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), Ted hires a writer's assistant, 16-year-old Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), for the summer. Sparks - and quite a bit more - soon develop between Eddie and Marion. Ted, who is having a fling with one of his models, may have engineered the Marion/Eddie coupling.  Both elder Coles are working through grief, albeit in significantly different ways. Eddie becomes the pawn.  The Ted Cole of "A Widow for One Year" is nobody's idea of a nice guy. Feckless, unfeeling and destructive, the man is nonetheless a devoted father and a charmer to boot.  "John Irving has always been so quick to condemn Ted, which I find interesting and curious," says Williams. "Why can't he extend some forgiveness to the guy? But I knew from the beginning that Ted would need to steer the film - and I'd need an actor who would be able to do that.  "That was Jeff. Jeff's the best."  Returns Bridges, "Some of (Ted's) unattractive qualities sort of attracted me to him. It's interesting to play a guy who's not tied up in a neat little bow. He's got some crazy loose hairs. He's a vain guy, quite selfish, but he's got some charm to him, and he's got some talent. It was an interesting combination."  If you count his appearances as a teen on his father's series "Sea Hunt" and "The Lloyd Bridges Show," it's a little unnerving to realize that Jeff Bridges is now entering his sixth decade of performance. He's played everyguys, action heroes, cops, murderers, shrinks, space aliens and radio DJs. He earned his first Oscar nomination at age 22 for playing the small-town Texas teen Duane Jackson in "The Last Picture Show." A generation of people know him as the philosophical slacker who goes by "The Dude" in the Coen Brothers' "The Big Lebowski."  He's long been attached to play the missionary in the still-in-development adaptation of Irving's novel, "A Son of the Circus." That he was available for "The Door in the Floor" was, for both Irving and Williams, a happy bit of good timing.  "I sent Jeff all my dailies, and that's the thing you're most not supposed to do," says Williams. "He's an all-around sort of creative force, and he kind of reminds people around him that anybody can sort of do anything. He really did inspire the whole crew - and me. He made you feel like you could do more than you thought, that you could try and fall on your face."  The artist/illustrator component to the role intrigued Bridges as well, to the point that he wound up contributing most of the drawings seen in the film. He has also published, with Irving, a book of "The Door in the Floor," Ted Cole's darkly hued children's story within "A Widow for One Year" that gives the film its title. Concluding that book are several photos taken on the set by Bridges, who has made photography a serious hobby since his work on "Starman" in the 1980s.  That's Bridges for you: an actor as likely to come up with a key piece of costuming (like the voluminous caftan Ted favors for his squash games) as he is to play piano (as he did for his role in "The Fabulous Baker Boys"), take photos and, oh yeah, act.  "I'm there being paid to act," says Bridges. "The photos I don't take too seriously. They're basically snapshots, I guess you'd say, but from an interesting vantage point. The costumes are a really important part of my process building a character - wardrobe, what the guy wears. It all really sort of adds up. The ideas come from all over, but they have to be passed through the director."  He's being modest about the photos. He published "Jeff Bridges: Photographs" in the fall of 2003 and has had exhibitions at Rose Gallery in Santa Monica. Upcoming shows are scheduled for the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., this month and at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts in November.  Bridges uses a Wide Lux panning camera, which he first discovered in high school when he heard a rumor of a strange panning camera whereby "if you ran around really quickly, you could be in the picture twice."  "Years later, at my wedding, there was a guy there who was taking pictures with this funny-looking camera," says Bridges. "I loved the results he got, and my wife was kind enough to get me one. I've been through a few of them now. They're kind of fragile."  The actor and his wife, Susan ("my true, real-life leading lady"), have been married for 27 years and have three children. Bridges confesses that one of the perks of acting is getting to share a mini lifetime with a glamorous co-star like Kim Basinger.  "I find I could, you know, probably fall in love with all my leading ladies," says Bridges. "But in the movie of my real life, my wife Sue, I'm so madly in love with her. One of the things I love about her is that she allows me to go off and do this kind of art and allows me to have these kinds of relationships with women like Kim. She feels secure enough in our love to allow me to go out there."  Asked whether she could foresee herself with a man like Bridges, Basinger turns to her co-star and asks, with a laugh, "What are you like at home?  "He's probably naked at home all the time peeling his onion," says Basinger. "And I'd be afraid of his camera all the time."  How do you get over loss? That is the question that haunts author John Irving and it runs all the way through The Door in the Floor, the film adaptation of his 1998 novel, SIMON HOUPT writes NEW YORK -- By now, John Irving is surrounded by water. It happens every summer, when he escapes his two homes and their twin oppressions, the heat of Toronto and the verdant sameness of Vermont, by fleeing to his cottage in Georgian Bay for the whole of July. But don't get too envious at the thought of him lounging around Muskoka. Last month he sat down in a Park Avenue hotel room to talk about The Door in the Floor, which opens tomorrow, a delicate and haunting film adaptation of the first part of his 1998 novel A Widow for One Year, and about the massive task that lay ahead of him when he returned to Canada. It seems he finished his latest novel in April, his longest ever, showed it to his editor here in New York, she loved it, Random House bought it. Not quite end of story. "Twenty-eight days ago I woke up and said: It really should be in the third-person," he began. "It's a first-person novel." More information may give you a sense of his burden: the book currently runs a Clintonian 345,000 words. The longest novel heretofore in Irving's oeuvre is A Son of the Circus, which ran at about 258,000 words, and was published at more than 700 pages. "This was my first first-person novel since A Prayer for Owen Meany," said Irving, sitting all but motionless at a small circular table, a newly cracked bottle of water at his left. He wore black workout pants and a sky-blue tennis shirt purchased by his wife, clothes that accentuated his lean, muscular build and uncommon fitness at age 62. You could still hear in his deep caramel intonations a hint of the radio announcing he did part-time as an undergraduate in Vienna, where he studied writing with Gunter Grass. The new book is about a tattoo artist and a church organist addicted to being tattooed. "I don't normally like the first-person voice and I can't even remember what rationale led me to think this had to be a first-person novel, but for the five years I've been writing it, it was. And just one morning I woke up and thought: 'Shit. It's not right.' And it's already bought, you know? And I said: 'Well, too bad.' " So Irving took it back and has been hard at work, eight to nine hours a day, seven days a week, revising the book with a sharp eye on the copy-editor's deadline of Jan. 3, 2005, which would still allow publication next June. It's a schedule that would cripple Ted Cole, the character at the centre of The Door in the Floor. Cole (Jeff Bridges, in a mischievous, shining, occasionally naked performance) is a successful children's author, newly separated from his wife Marion (Kim Basinger), who seems more interested in pursuing flagrant sado-masochistic affairs with women throughout the Hamptons than working on his books. His lasciviousness and laziness is noted with muted disappointment by Eddie O'Hare, a callow 16-year-old spending the summer as Cole's personal assistant, waiting for a task more challenging than driving him to his assignations. (Still, to Eddie's benefit, all that free time allows him room to develop a crush on the distant Marion.) Ted and Marion are broken people, shattered by a winter car accident years before that killed their two teenage sons. They tried to rebuild their lives and even had another child, a daughter, now 4, but they remain permanently damaged by their loss. Not that you'd know it from Ted's womanizing. "I try to think of characters who on the surface of their actions are deeply unsympathetic," Irving explained. "It's the writer's job to make them sympathetic, in spite of themselves. I felt that in Cider House Rules the challenge, in both the novel and the film, was always: This is an ether-addicted abortionist. How do you make him a hero? If that guy's a headline in the newspaper, he doesn't sound like a good guy. . . . And if he's not sympathetic then the movie doesn't work. "And you have so little time. In a book you have pages and pages of detail to persuade the reader that, 'Yeah, I know it's a bad thing this person is doing, but he's hurting. He's doing it for a reason. He's lost something. He's lost his children. Suspend or withhold your judgment. Don't judge this person too soon.' In a film, you're so afraid, you have so little time to develop that sympathy. But you have something you don't have in a novel. You have an actor like Kim Basinger and you have an actor like Jeff Bridges." Readers of A Widow for One Year who adored the book for its typically dense plot and intertwining characters may be disappointed by the minor role to which the couple's four-year-old daughter Ruth has been relegated in The Door in the Floor.  Ruth is frequently cited as Irving's most complex and emotionally developed character in his body of work. The novel is primarily her story. But Widow is like many of Irving's novels in the way it traces characters over a long span of time (more than three decades), an approach that can present problems for film adaptations. "I didn't see how to do it," Irving said, of adapting Widow. The director and screenwriter Tod Williams suggested to him that, since the novel is structured as a play in three acts, they should adapt just the first act, which covers the summer of Ruth's fifth year. So as not to confuse the book's readers, Irving suggested they pull a new title for the film from one of the chapter titles. (Good thing they went with the one they did rather than, say, A Masturbating Machine.)  The Door in the Floor doubles as the title of one of Ted Cole's better children's books, a macabre story about an unborn child deciding whether to be born, and thereby expose himself to the world's manifold dangers. Readers of The World According to Garp, Irving's fourth book, which made his name, will recognize The Door in the Floor as a close relation to the undertoad, a child's concept of lurking dangers. Danger, loss and absence are familiar themes in Irving's novels: in The Fourth Hand, Patrick manages to lose his left hand twice; in The Cider House Rules, all of the parents are missing; Garp, the book to which Widow is probably most similar, also features the accidental death of a child. The fear of loss has always animated Irving, ever since the birth of his first son when he was only 23 years old. He has since had two other sons including his youngest, born in 1991 to his second wife, the Canadian literary agent Janet Turnbull. "I think probably there's nothing in my life that I fear as much as something happening to my children; I think that I was lucky to have had a child when I was still an undergraduate in university. I don't know all the things that made me a writer, but I know that I became a fearful person, an anxious person, from the moment my first child was born, and the world became a frightening place, and the act of the imagination became imagining: What is the worst thing that can happen to people? What can always go wrong, what will go wrong, and how do you get over that?" In that way, Ted Cole is John Irving's doppelganger, a man who responded to real loss by turning the experience into a story. Somewhere, years ago, perhaps Cole felt he could use the process to bring himself back to the land of the living. "It seems the best way to understand someone is to recognize how they recover, or can't recover, from what's hurt them," Irving explained.  "To me, that's one of the measures of someone's character, that's where sympathy for people often comes from. How do you get over something? Or, in Marion's case, how do you never get over something? Ted thinks he's tougher. He thinks he can tell the story. It turns her to stone? Well it turns him to something else." Jeff Bridges opens up 'Door in the Floor' for Kim Basinger LOS ANGELES -- If you've read John Irving's A Widow for One Year, the first third of which has been turned into the film The Door in the Floor, there's some critical casting that might at first seem a little, well, off. SEE IT NOW  It's not Kim Basinger. She might have been whom Irving imagined when he created Marion Cole, a 39-year-old mother "who looked 29, or slightly younger," who is honey-blond with a perfect mouth, naturally sexy, distractingly gorgeous. "Almost without a flaw," writes Irving with the fervor of a besotted teenager.  Tod Williams, who adapted and directed The Door in the Floor, says he had Basinger in mind from the beginning, though he had little hope of getting her for the role. He wasn't altogether surprised when Basinger initially turned down the role of a woman who, for all her physical perfection, is deeply damaged by an almost unbearable tragedy.  No, it's the casting of Jeff Bridges, the actor who plays Marion's husband, six years older, a renowned children's book author and illustrator, a drunken charmer who preys on women half his age in an insular East Hampton, that doesn't initially seem to jibe. Then you see the movie and rap yourself on the head. This is Jeff Bridges -- the Starman, the Dude, heck, the president in The Contender. He could probably play Einstein convincingly.  Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges star in The Door in the Floor, the film adaptation of author John Irving's A Widow for One Year.  "Finally," says Basinger, seated next to Bridges in a Los Angeles hotel suite, going through the chronology of how Door in the Floor got made, "they called and said: 'What if Jeff Bridges was playing your husband? Would that make a difference?' And I said, 'Well, yeahhhh, that might change things a little, sure.' It's Jeff. I can't really turn down that opportunity, can I?"  Bridges, sprawled on the couch, looks at Basinger and feigns, or perhaps even feels, surprise at the compliment.  "Back atcha, darling," he says, patting Basinger's arm.  Like the characters they play in Door in the Floor, they are an unlikely pairing in the mind, but not on the screen or in the flesh. She's the pinup who matured, against all odds, into one of the screen's most compelling actors. She has an Academy Award for L.A. Confidential to prove it.  Bridges is her aw-shucks, self-effacing complement, perhaps the most admired actor on the planet with no Oscar to show for it. They costarred together in 1987 in Robert Benton's not-quite-screwball-enough comedy Nadine, but it's the rare soul who actually remembers it.  "We were a lot younger, weren't we?" says Basinger to Bridges. "We've been through some stuff since then, haven't we?"  The Door in the Floor is a story of unlikely love, inconsolable grief and absurd entanglements viewed through the anything-but-objective eyes of Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster). Eddie is a prep-school scholarship teenager with literary ambitions who is hired by Ted to be his assistant for the summer. His real job, however, is to drive Ted to his adulterous assignations, Ted having been relieved of his driver's license.  But to Eddie's amazement, he finds himself playing lover to Marion, who has been emotionally shut down since the auto-accident death of her beloved teenage sons. He's also nanny and confidant to a precocious 4-year-old daughter, Ruth.  "If anyone's looking for an alternative to the usual sort of summer movie," says Bridges, "we're it. I can pretty much promise you've not seen this movie before."  "I'll second that," says Basinger. "At least I never have. That may be why I was initially hesitant to do it. It sort of scared me."  For Williams, a native New Yorker nicknamed Kip to distinguish himself from his architect father (and who describes himself as a part-time Michigander because he spent a good portion of his formative years in Birmingham and Up North with an uncle and various other family members), the characters' loss made it much easier to empathize with them.  "These are people that on the face of it would seem hard to like," he says. "Ted's a philanderer even before his sons die, and Marion makes a lot of questionable decisions afterward, beginning with taking Eddie as her lover. That's one of the reasons I always looked forward to a John Irving novel. The characters are always daring you to love them."  The success of Irving novels like The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules would seem to have assured that A Widow for One Year would be turned into a film. But its plot and theme made some studios skittish. Williams, who spent four years getting his independently financed drama The Adventures of Sebastian Cole on-screen after being accepted at the American Film Institute, says he was hoping the generally good reviews for that film would lead to his being offered a screenplay or directing job.  But after reading Widow, he was so taken by the first section (the novel's story continues for another three decades) that he began working on what is called a speculation script, having not acquired the rights.  Williams wrote Irving what he calls "a long, impassioned fan letter" that resulted in a meeting during which Irving sold him the adaptation rights to the book for $1, with, of course, legal assurances more money would be forthcoming if the script were filmed.  The initial, and more obvious, choice to play Ted was Bill Murray. As is his wont, Murray delayed the decision for months before saying no, during which time Basinger turned down the role of Marion.  "I was pretty raw at the time," says Basinger, who had gone through a much-publicized split from her husband, Alec Baldwin. "I didn't really know if I wanted to work at all, but even if I thought that would be right, this was something I figured would be too ... you know, just too."  As for Bridges, he says he loves working with writers and directors like Williams, who "haven't been indoctrinated in what they're supposed to do and what they're not."  "I really like a set like this one, in which everyone is focused on the same thing, which is making a movie that connects us to each other and an audience, as opposed to one where we make a lot of presumptions about who the audience is and what they want. I work best when we're all sort of going on our best instincts."  "Hey," interrupts Basinger, "this is a guy who made an entire movie from inside a computer."  She's referring to 1982's Tron, in which Bridges played a computer whiz who gets trapped inside a computer before most of us knew how to turn one on. "He's like fearless. He's my hero," says Basinger.  Williams says Basinger is his hero. Only after they arrived in the Hamptons to begin shooting did he realize the house he had secured for filming was near one where Baldwin and Basinger had lived.  "She's so much tougher than she lets on," says Williams. "And there's this thing between Jeff and her that you just can't write on the page. They either feel it or they don't. I was so lucky they did."  Bridges and Basinger are equally enamored of their director: "I think he's going to make some pretty amazing films," says Basinger. "For me, it was the same feeling I had with Curtis" (meaning Curtis Hanson, who directed her in L.A. Confidential and again as Eminem's mother in 8 Mile).  "I know what she means," seconds Bridges. "You either feel safe to take chances or you don't. On this movie, we were all in the boat together."  As for whether this could be the movie that finally wins Bridges that Oscar, he professes to be unconcerned.  "What I know is that Kim is terrific, and so are the other people in that movie, and that I enjoyed the whole thing. If there's something beyond that, hey, thanks. If not, Kip got this story up there. God bless him."
	15  luglio: Un po' di news! Kim Basinger Widowed -  A typical novelist might be offended if a filmmaker suggested bringing only half of his book to the big screen. But in John Irving's case, that approach was the primary reason he allowed writer-director Tod Williams to adapt his 1998 best-seller, A Widow for One Year. "I don't feel there's been a film as faithful to me or my writing as this one," the author says of the resulting movie, The Door in the Floor. It stars Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges, and opens today in limited release. Surprisingly, Irving even includes his own Oscar-winning adaptation of his 1985 novel The Cider House Rules in that assessment. Although Tobey Maguire did a fine job, he explains, "I had to lose so much of that novel by trying to adapt the whole thing. I had to compress 15 years into one. I had to lose a number of characters and a major plotline or two. By sticking strictly to the first 180 pages [of Widow], Tod was able to be much more line-by-line faithful to the book." Irving admits that there's another, more selfish, benefit to this kind of adaptation. "What's great about it from a novelist's point of view is that the film is so faithful to the way the book begins, but it doesn't touch anything in Act 2 or 3," he says. "So for people who haven't read the book and go to see the movie, if they like it and wonder what happens next, nothing's been stolen. Act 2 and Act 3 are [left] pristine." According to Irving, Williams wasn't the first film director to express interest in Widow. None of the other ideas really pleased him, though. "All of them began with Ruth as a grown up, which meant that the first part of the story would have been a three to five minute flashback. But to me, it's the emotional and psychological underpinning of who Ruth is. I didn't want to see that as a flashback in a movie about an adult. That little girl is too important." Despite his dissatisfaction, Irving was never motivated to adapt the book himself. "I didn't see it as a movie," he says frankly. Williams' idea to only film the first section won him over, as did his plan to update the story from the 1950s to the present day. "That was a pretty easy decision," Irving remembers. "Since we're not telling the rest of the story, passage of time isn't a problem. I also felt that we were freer to make the story seem almost common and ordinary, whereas if you set it back in the '50s, the relationships would seem more overwhelming." The Door in the Floor is only the fourth film adaptation of an Irving novel (not counting 1998's Simon Birch, a very loose interpretation of one of his most popular books, A Prayer for Owen Meany). And the scribe says it doesn't look like there'll be another one in the near future. Still, he continues to hope that his screenplay for his 1994 novel A Son of the Circus might someday find its way to the big screen after more than a decade in development hell. "I haven't given up on that one," Irving laughs. "It took 13 years to do Cider House. I don't care how long it takes me to do this. Through the Door to controversy  Kim Basinger stars in a film about “how people get over things: how they recover, or don’t recover, from what they lose.”  BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – It was the day they were filming the first of the sex scenes — and Kim Basinger was nervous.  This, in spite of the fact that she was no stranger to the process. After all, the steamy kinkiness of her scenes with Mickey Rourke in Nine And A Half Weeks remain an entrenched part of Hollywood folklore.  But The Door in the Floor was a different proposition, and it had the potential of being highly controversial with moviegoers. After all, it was plunging Basinger, 50, into some torrid scenes with 18-year-old Jon Foster — scenes which were pivotal to this film about the pain and grief of family loss, but which were also guaranteed to earn it a Restricted rating.  “I’ve been through this many times, and it’s not ever easy or fun,” Basinger says reflectively. She notes that even though such moments are carefully choreographed to the point where the participants will never forget that they are merely acting, they are always a challenge to do.  But she was doubly concerned on this occasion because of Foster’s age.  “I’m so fond of him and protective of him — which is just the opposite to most of these situations, because usually I’ve worked with men who are very protective of me. So this was quite the reverse. But Jon was a trooper, just a lovely guy.”  Yet she also knew these sequences were essential to the movie’s integrity and she decided to be as matter-of-fact as possible about them.  “And you know what?” she laughs. “I couldn’t have chosen a better partner!  “I said: ‘Jon, let’s just do this thing. Come on!’ It just sort of happened in a natural fashion. I said: ‘It’s just a scene. Just do whatever.’”  And they did it.  The Door in the Floor, opening Wednesday, is writer-director Todd Williams’s adaptation of one section of John Irving’s best-selling, A Widow for One Year. It’s a tragi-comic examination of the complexities and ambiguities of personal relationships and of how one troubled couple deals with the emotional wounds inflicted on them by a family tragedy.  Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is a successful children’s-book writer confronted with the erosion of his own marriage to Marion, played by Basinger. His own egocentric behaviour and open womanizing is part of the problem: a deeper cause is the continuing grief both experience as the result of the death of two sons in an accident. They both love their remaining child (Elle Fanning) but their estrangement from each other continues to grow as Marion withdraws into emotional loneliness and isolation.  Todd Williams sees The Door In The Floor as a film about how love is defined by loss. Basinger sees it as a film about people forced to confront “the depths of truth.” Author John Irving sees it as an examination into “how people get over things: how they recover, or don’t recover, from what they lose.”  But in resolving these emotional issues, the film strikes out on its own controversial path. Foster’s character is Eddie — a sexually naive teenager ostensibly brought to Ted’s beach house to work as his assistant, but instead destined to be the catalyst who dramatically alters the dynamic of this troubled family. Eddie brings this about because of his sexual yearning (complete with masturbatory fantasies) for Marion — a yearning which reawakens her own sexuality.  It’s not only the nude bedroom encounters which make the material provocative. There is also an incestuous subtext: part of Eddie’s attraction for Marion is that he reminds her of her dead son. There’s also the mounting evidence that Ted has engineered this May-December affair because he hopes that it might actually save a troubled marriage.  Basinger knows such material is potentially incendiary. She also accepts the fact that American cinema is more tolerant of relationships between older men and young women than it is of a reverse situation.  “I don’t care,” she says in a tone of calm defiance. “I enjoyed every minute of this. I think that love and sex and everything come in all different ways and sizes in life. I’ve always had this European attitude about things — a looseness.”  One of her favourite movies is the cult classic Harold and Maude, about a young male’s relationship with a woman in her 80s.  “I think that all my life I’ve been so attracted to the Harold and Maude aspect of living as opposed to the norm. ‘Normal’ is so boring. I like to spice it up a little myself.”  There was also the lure of working again with Bridges, her co-star in the quirky 1987 caper comedy, Nadine. She admires Bridges’s courage in taking on tough and challenging characters like the one he portrays in The Door in the Floor. She points out that he’s playing a character who essentially orchestrates his wife’s affair with a teenage boy — an action that was “manipulative and ugly.” And she admires the way Bridges takes risks.  “I’ve never seen another actor go through the process like he does so that his characters are truly full. (Yet) I don’t see that he uses anything but his creative mind to come up with the things he comes up with.”  Meanwhile, Bridges insists he drew on his own nature to create Ted, a character, who provokes warring emotions among those who come in contact with him.  “I’m selfish and manipulative. I can see that in myself,” the 55-year-old actor says. “I don’t have to observe other people, although I do it. We all have that darker side.”  Bridges enjoys acting with Basinger despite the fact that they are often total opposites in their approach to their work: he loves talking about a scene and endlessly analyzing it; she is quieter and more introspective in her preparation.  “But what counts is the finished illusion, and how you get that doesn’t matter too much.  “One of my favourite moments in the movie, if not my favourite, is that kind of silent scene we had when we were just sitting there looking at each other in the car. We didn’t talk about it … We just brought what we brought to it.” Love—and death—on Long Island! Irving adaptation becomes Lands' End commercial Too little has been said about John Irving's typographical tics. He may or may not be our Dickens, but he is decidedly an ace at emphasis. He's generous with exclamation points! He does the italics—and the dashes—and (in A Prayer for Owen Meany) the ALL CAPS TO DENOTE VOLUME. This supple handling of standard prose markings, as much as well-turned plots and endearing characters, keeps the pages turning.  Cinema scrubs these graphic prods, and the shruggable quality of Irving's filmed oeuvre may owe something to this insurmountable blockage of energy. In regard to the attention paid to such prosaic mechanics, Tod Williams's The Door in the Floor (an adaptation of Irving's A Widow for One Year) is a triumph. As a character notes of the kid's-book author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), he "changes a comma from a semicolon, and the next day he changes it back." Who can perceive such invisible emendation?  More transparently, The Door in the Floor eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy. At times it plays like an affecting portrait of a marriage on life support intersecting with an earnest coming-of-age story, at times like a Lands' End catalog in which all the models have been instructed to squint at the middle distance. Famous, randy Ted and beautiful but zombie-like Marion (Kim Basinger) have drifted apart since the tragic death of their two teenage sons. (The sound design features the most significant use of a car's turn signal since Park Ki-yong's Camel(s).) They have a young daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), who prefers her father to her shell-shocked mom; the photos of her deceased brothers, whose lives she pleads to hear about, turn their Hamptons house into a memory palace for people she never knew in the flesh.  In the film's fateful summer, Ted takes on a writing assistant, virginal Exeter kid Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), not simply out of allegiance to alma mater but as an offering to his withdrawn wife: Eddie resembles one of their sons. Amanuensis and spouse become lovers, and the film doesn't stint on the lust. Yet the psychology behind the affair—and behind Ted's counterintuitive gift—doesn't quite work on the screen. Bridges gives a full-bodied (and often bare-butted) performance that's a more somber counterpart to his incarnation as the Dude, but too much silence hems in Foster and Basinger, and their inarticulateness scans more cryptically than necessary. At a critical moment, Marion declares that she'd rather be no mother to Ruth than a bad one, to which Eddie responds, "That doesn't make any sense." And indeed it doesn't.  Widow's full arc might have filled in the blanks; intensifying Irving's playful metafiction, both Eddie and Ruth become novelists. In the film, though, Ted's the only scribbler; the writing life becomes a trap, and the title's portal gets a literal, elegant workout in the final scene. The image brings to mind this year's Secret Window, based on a story by another would-be latter-day Dickens, Stephen King. In that Depp-charged glimpse of authorial madness, a fictional way out of a marriage leads to a murder that will correspond to what was previously only imagined. For all Door's flaws, there's a hermetic grace to its final erasure; "a sound"—as Ted Cole writes of a mouse at midnight—"like someone trying not to make a sound"; a comma removed and replaced.  MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Door in the Floor' is a respite from summer overkill (SMW) - Ted Cole prowls his domain like a lion king. A famous children's book author and illustrator, he is the alpha male of his East Hampton realm, philandering with a succession of eager women who are flattered by his attention before it sours into indifference and contempt.  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger play a husband and wife whose marriage is damaged by the deaths of their two sons in "The Door in the Floor."  Ted is not quite divorced from his wife, Marion, but she might as well be a ghost in their oceanside mansion. A family trauma some years earlier has rendered her emotionally numb and more or less indifferent to Ted's promiscuity. Their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth, studies old photographs hung on the walls for clues about why Mommy hurts so much. The Coles' precarious emotional balance slips when teenaged Eddie O'Hare arrives as Ted's intern and develops a fierce crush on Marion.  Ted's latest bestseller is "The Door in the Floor," a fable about a mother, a child and dark places that can swallow you whole. Keeping the darkness of insecurity, depression and family disorder locked away is a talent the Coles have mastered. Jeff Bridges plays Ted as an arrogant sensualist who favors a pasha's flowing caftan when he's not impudently strolling nude around the hired help. Yet he conducts his affairs in an atmosphere of propriety, bringing his sketchbook to each "modeling session."  As Marion, Kim Basinger radiates the decorous despair of Liv Ullmann or Bibi Andersson in a Bergman tragedy. She doesn't bare her soul in table-pounding monologues because she doesn't have to. Her still expression is eloquent of interior torment. Casting both these actors, usually so warm and free-spirited, in clamped-down roles, signals exactly how much vitality has hemorrhaged from their marriage.  Jon Foster, who plays Eddie, is our befuddled guide to this tangled relationship. He is spending the summer with Ted - ostensibly as his assistant - but the writer never gives him anything to do beyond chauffeuring him around to his affairs. It's as if he is hoping the boy will snap Marion out of her trance. Eddie resembles one of their departed sons, so he might be trying to rekindle a maternal spark. When Eddie responds erotically to Marion, Ted finds a way to play that angle to his advantage, too.  All three of the principals have frank nude scenes in a story that plays out like "Last Tango in Long Island." When the resulting Oedipal triangle ultimately breaks apart, every viewer will have a different take on which character was liberated and which was humiliated. The film gives you the feeling that the characters themselves aren't sure.  The film's intelligence owes a lot to its pedigree. It was adapted from a portion of John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year." Writer/director Tod Williams' choice to dramatize only a slice of a larger work might seem odd, but it is really a terrific idea. Wouldn't Philip Roth have been better served last year if the filmmaking team for "The Human Stain" had pulled one crisp episode rather than film every comma of the book? I know moviegoers would have been.  The film honors Irving's view of life as a wrestling match between fatalism and hilarity thanks in large part to Bridges' note-perfect performance. In a funny/sad scene, one of Ted's castoff lovers attempts to run him down in her SUV, and Bridges makes his escape in a panting, flat-footed dash. A few minutes after stumbling through shrubbery he finds safe haven in the town bookstore, signing copies of his work like a grandee and eyeing the prettiest customers. He makes the man incorrigible, silly, and yet attractive.  "The Door in the Floor" is a perversely gripping adult story counter-programmed into the midsummer flood of overheated action flicks. The characters' vulnerability is a welcome change from the parade of indestructible heroes now on tap. The Coles are multidimensional, their motivations and conflicts are complex. Their eruptions of emotional warfare and rickety truces don't sort themselves out in tidy little bundles of resolution. As the film ends, you ask yourself, "Whatever will become of these people?" What's more, you'll care.  An Idol Who's Deeply in Love With His Own Feet of Clay John Irving's fictional landscapes have proven irresistibly appealing to filmmakers, but the charm can be deceiving, even hazardous. His novels, full of lovely detail and lively incident, also tend to include patches of boggy, squishy sentimentality and overdone whimsy. In adapting Mr. Irving's recent book "A Widow For One Year," Tod Williams has avoided such perils to a degree that is almost miraculous. "The Door in the Floor," a renamed, reconfigured film version of that novel, which Mr. Williams wrote and directed, is surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based. And above all, Jeff Bridges offers perhaps the wittiest and richest piece of screen acting by an American man so far this year. The narrative, revisiting some of Mr. Irving's sturdy preoccupations — dead children, distant mothers, New England prep schools, the friction and affection between a bright young man and his older mentor — is full of invitations to cuteness, contrivance and maudlin excess, all of which Mr. Williams confidently declines. Mr. Bridges and Kim Basinger play Ted and Marion Cole, a long-married couple still reeling from the deaths, some years earlier, of their two teenage sons. Their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), was born after the car accident that killed her brothers, but rather than help her parents move beyond their grief she traps them inside it, and herself as well. A hallway in the Coles' rambling, shingled house in the Hamptons is lined with pictures of the boys, each one representing a story that Ted tells his daughter again and again.  He and Marion have decided to separate, an event that coincides with the arrival of Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a boarding-school student who has come to spend a summer working as Ted's assistant. Eddie is an aspiring writer, and Ted is a famous author and illustrator of children's books, one of which gives the film its title. Eddie hopes to learn something about writing, and since this is in some ways a standard coming-of-age story, the lessons he receives are not necessarily the ones he expected. Before long, the young man discovers that his idol is a vain, self-involved semi-alcoholic, a disillusionment that is both quickened and assuaged once the young man starts sleeping with the idol's wife. I'm sorry to dwell on the ways "The Door in the Floor," which opens today in 19 places, could have gone wrong, but some sense of the risks that Mr. Williams was taking is necessary to appreciate his achievement. If you examine the story closely, you can find soft spots of implausibility and cliché. But the shakiness of some of the film's central ideas — about parental mourning, about mature sexuality, about the way a young person's life can be changed forever by brief exposure to adult dysfunction — matters far less than it might.  Mr. Williams, whose previous film was "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole," resists the imperatives to streamline and shoehorn that afflict even the most sensitive screenwriters. (His producers also deserve credit for not imposing a more conventional structure on his film.) He takes his time with the story, meandering from one scene to the next and finding a halting, languorous rhythm that suits both the setting and the dominant mood of the characters.  If it seems like an unusually cold and foggy summer out on Long Island, so much the better, since the ambient mist provides the cinematographer, Terry Stacey, with a lovely palette of Japanese watercolor effects that mirror Ted's haunting ink-washed drawings. For his part, Mr. Williams has composed a tableau of unusual vividness and variety. He has alighted on Mr. Irving's most admirable quality: his alert, amused sympathy with people in trouble, which turns out to be pretty much synonymous with life. "The Door in the Floor" nimbly shifts between melodrama and comedy, with a delightful and perfectly executed excursion into high farce near the end, and it seems perpetually to be discovering new possibilities for its characters. This is the kind of movie in which the most transient, incidental people — a wealthy woman (Mimi Rogers) who models for Ted, her gardener (Louis Arcella), the haughty owner of a small framing shop (Donna Murphy) — seem to have odd, complicated lives that keep going when they're not on screen.  Mr. Foster and Ms. Basinger are both very good, but the film is dominated by Mr. Bridges' performance. Ted is, in many ways, monstrous, using his charm and talent the way he uses sex and drink, as a defense against both intimacy and guilt. It makes a certain perverse sense that Mr. Bridges, one of the most generous and understated actors around, should be so good at playing a narcissist. Ted's chief source of pleasure is himself, and Mr. Bridges' is Ted. When asked if he is primarily a writer or an artist, he always gives the same answer ("I'm an entertainer of children, who loves to draw"), each time puffing up with delight and his gift for perfect understatement. Mr. Bridges has a similar gift, but his modesty is genuine (he never puffs up unless Ted does too), and it enables him both to lift the actors around him and to expose the hidden, sad corners of Ted's craggy, mercurial personality.  Screen acting rarely achieves a sense of completion, which consists, paradoxically, in our sense that what we see is incomplete: that there is more to a character than meets the eye. Ted Cole is a great movie character because, as inconsistent, contradictory and unpredictable as he is, Mr. Bridges, jowly, paunchy and endlessly magnetic, somehow contains him. Mr. Bridges not only dominates the movie, he animates it. He is heroically life-size.  "The Door in the Floor" is rated R for nudity, obscenity and sexuality. THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR Directed by Tod Williams; written by Mr. Williams, based on the novel "A Widow For One Year" by John Irving; director of photography, Terry Stacey; edited by Affonso Gonçalves; music by Marcelo Zarvos; production designer, Thérèse dePrez; produced by Ted Hope, Anne Carey and Michael Corrente; released by Focus Features. Running time: 111 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Jeff Bridges (Ted Cole), Kim Basinger (Marion Cole), Jon Foster (Eddie O'Hare), Mimi Rogers (Evelyn Vaughn), Elle Fanning (Ruth Cole), Bijou Phillips (Alice) and Louis Arcella (Eduardo Gomez).  "The Door in the Floor": Scenes from a sad marriage  Open-and-shut: John Irving likes "Door" film adaptation  There are two reasons to see "The Door in the Floor," a languorous, fitfully compelling screen adaptation of the first chunk of John Irving's best-selling novel "A Widow for One Year."  The first reason: the accomplished performance by Jeff Bridges, one of our best under-sung actors, as successful children's author Ted Cole — a tricky role Bridges handles with shrewd complexity.  The second? Real-estate lust.  Anyone wondering why East Coasters are gaga for the Hamptons, on Long Island, will get a clue gazing at the casually upscale spread where the film is set. The spacious, shingled Dutch colonial home, with its sweeping lawns and ocean vistas, belongs to Ted, his wife, Marion (a wanly melancholic Kim Basinger), and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning).  It's also a kind of shrine to the Coles' twin sons, a pair of golden boys whose accidental deaths in their teenage prime have haunted and paralyzed Marion for years, and made little Ruth pretty weird.  Irving's "A Widow for One Year" covers three significant acts in Ruth's life. But "The Door in the Floor" (scripted by the movie's director, Tod Williams) centers on Act 1, the breakup of the Coles' long marriage due to prolonged grief and guilt, Ted's chronic infidelities and Marion's affair with Eddie (Jon Foster), a teenager who spends a summer as Ted's so-called assistant.  Ted, who wrestles with his own fears and compulsions, is the most engaging character on hand — as well as the most potentially repellent.  **½  "The Door in the Floor," directed by Tod Williams from his own screenplay, based on a John Irving novel. With Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers, Jon Foster. 111 minutes. Rated R for strong sexuality, graphic images and language. Opens today at The Egyptian.  In Bridges' hands, he's a rumpled, bohemian charmer and genuinely loving father. His analyses of Eddie's writing attempts and Marion's chronic pain are spot-on, yet compassionate.  But Bridges doesn't shy away from Ted's manipulativeness and misogyny either. He's a rascal — with the older women he seduces and dumps (Mimi Rogers plays one of his scores), the young girls he flatters and woos and even with the initially naive Eddie.  "Door in the Floor" (the title comes from Ted's best-known book) gets a spark and a lift whenever Bridges is front and center. But Foster's awkward, recessive Eddie takes up at least as much screen time, and his rites of passage can be as electrifying as watching moss grow.  The coupling between Eddie and Basinger's somnambulant Ruth transforms them, allegedly. But puppy love and depressive grief don't produce sexual sizzle — not here, at least.  The affair upsets the balance of power between the Coles. But it's hard to invest much in their marriage anyway. And flashbacks to their boys' fatal accident don't raise the stakes much.  "The Door in the Floor" has "prestige indie project" written all over it. And if Bridges wins acclaim, it will be well deserved.  But you have to wonder about a movie that leaves you with the wrong burning question. As in: if the Coles divorce, who gets dibs on their amazing Hamptons pad?  'The Door' is inviting, but doesn't open fully Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges play a married couple going through personal turmoil.  GRADE: B- Running time: 110 minutes Rated R for strong sexuality and graphic images and language There’s some indefinable lack to “The Door in the Floor,” a perfectly acceptable but less-than-magical adaptation of one of John Irving’s quirk-riddled stories. Well-acted, well-shot, humorous, touching, thoughtful and sharp, it nonetheless is missing that certain spark that lifts solid work above itself.  Still, those looking for serious dramatic fare amidst summer’s abundance of silliness could do far worse. Jeff Bridges, who seems somehow doomed to turn in great performances in not-great films, stars as Ted Cole, a children’s book writer whose marriage to wife Marion (Kim Basinger) is on shaky ground. This is partly because of the death of their two sons in an accident, partly because it’s always been on shaky ground.  The ground gets even shakier when aspiring writer Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster) comes to stay with the Coles. He’s supposedly there to learn from the master, but his actual function is that of chauffeur, driving Ted to various romantic liaisons. Ignored by Ted, he instead bonds with Marion, who has long been adrift in depression, unable to fully care for her remaining child, daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning, yes, Dakota’s younger sister).  Ted is the film’s center, and Bridges lets his unabashed confidence and cracked foundation come through with a brash, physical performance. Basinger has never looked better (and she’s always looked great), age having given her more to mourn with. And young Foster is the picture of young, dumb love.  And yet ... perhaps it’s the affectations of the characters that Irving first drew, perhaps it’s the unlikely ease of the love triangle, maybe it’s simply the jumble of damaged people, but “The Door in the Floor” doesn’t captivate as much as it earns respect. Respect, on the other hand, should never be underestimated.  Confidentially yours: Basinger opens ‘The Door' to her heart, motherhood and new film Rivaling her Oscar-winning work in “L.A. Confidential,” Kim Basinger makes 50 look like the new 40 as Jeff Bridges' depressed Hamptons housewife in “The Door in the Floor,” opening tomorrow.  As for looking so good at the half-century mark, Basinger said, “If a number has a reason to exist out there other than just to say, ‘Kim Basinger, she's 50,' that's fine. Describe me in whatever way you will.  “I think that looseness and letting go of something is very important. Also, not harboring any kind of bad feelings, anger or whatever, because it can destroy the way you look. I love to exercise as well, and I drink water and all of that stuff. But honestly, I think that it's an inward thing. It has to be a conscious decision on your part to not let someone else or something eat your life. I think that it has so much to do with it.”  Basinger, who last scored with as Eminem's trailer-park mom in “8 Mile,” beds a teenaged virgin (played by Boston native Jon Foster, brother of Ben) in the film.  “I couldn't have asked for a better partner,” Basinger said. “Jon is an angel, a beautiful, beautiful human being. All through my career, I've had the guys that I've slept with on the screen cover up and take care of me. Then I found myself with Jon. He's my ‘Summer of '42' and my ‘Harold and Maude' wrapped up in one.”  “Door in the Floor” puts her alongside Bridges as early Oscar contenders in this first-rate adaptation of a section of John Irving's mammoth “A Widow for One Year,” but Basinger said she tried to pass on playing Marion, the unhappy mother and wife.  “I honestly said that I couldn't do this. I loved the piece, but I had just had a back operation some months prior. I just didn't feel like I was going to be physically ready to do it and it broke my heart.  “You know, my lawyer swears that I go through this every time that I choose a movie, the real worthwhile ones. That's exactly what happened. I initially probably turned it down two or three times. It's so funny because it's like (‘L.A. Confidential' director) Curtis Hanson always said, ‘Kim, you'll read something and hate it. Or you'll fear it and you'll do it.' Marion came along at a time in my life where I just knew her. She was someone that just said, ‘You know me.' “  It's easy to see the connection. Marion lives in the ultra-rich Hamptons on Long Island. As her marriage disintegrates, a bitter custody battle over a child (Elle Fanning, sister of Dakota) looms.  “It has echoes for me because I lived in the Hamptons,” Basinger said. “It's publicly known that I went through a divorce - with Alec (Baldwin) - and one that I didn't want public.”  Earlier this month, the couple concluded a contentious custody fight over their 8-year-old daughter, Ireland. They now share joint custody.  “I think that with just a little bit of imagination you just know that hurt is always involved there, and feelings of an emotional range that no one in the world could ever understand in a million years unless you've gone there,” Basinger said. “Does one like myself draw from that? Absolutely.  “But it's not a direct correlation. It's just that we all go on a journey in our lives. I was just at a time in my life where I could understand her silence and her aloneness.”  The reality of being a mother aided her efforts.  “Once you become a mother, your heart is no longer yours anyway and my daughter, she's the greatest thing that I'll ever do in my life. I'm sure that all parents feel the same way about their children. I don't think that I could've done this piece had I not been a mom, either.”  Baldwin and Basinger met and fell in love on a movie set in 1990, the aptly named “The Marrying Man.” They championed animal rights and each other. Then it was over, and the lawyers took over the wreckage of their union. Does she see a purpose in this ordeal?  “You know what? I made my choices in this life,” she said. “You've got a free will. I made my choices. But I always love that childlike line that God makes lemonade out of lemons, and I got Ireland out of mine.”  She laughed.  “So I got her. It's been quite a horrible battle, but we've gotten through it. I wouldn't even it call it a consolation prize. I'd call it a gift from God that he gave me the opportunity to do this part right in the middle of all of it. All of it, it's amazing.” Film Review: "The Door in the Floor"  While it bastardizes John Irving's celebrated novel, "A Widow For One Year," "The Door in the Floor" does a fine job recreating Irvingesque touches such as the unflinching sexuality between the characters, and the rich costal textures of the Northeast. If there's a true reason to see the film, it would be Jeff Bridges, who once again proves how masterful an actor he is with another terrific performance. Ted Cole (Bridges, simply one of the best actors around) is a blocked children’s book author coasting off his fame and enjoying his lavish, artistic lifestyle. His wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), is emotionally paralyzed from a tragic accident which killed their two sons years ago, and can’t get herself together to be a mother to their young daughter (Elle Fanning, sister to Dakota). When the Coles take in a teenage writing student named Eddie (Jon Foster, “Terminator 3”) for the summer so that he can learn the ways of an author, the young man soon falls into lust with Marion, and the two embark on a sexual relationship that opens up the wounded mother emotionally and romantically.  As the title suggests, Irving's story has been changed radically for the film. What remains of Irving’s touches are his affection for the Northeastern American lifestyle; full of privilege and dysfunction, and the ways this life can veer from beautiful to envious to poisonous all in a single instant. Writer/director Tod Williams’s last film, “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,” explored another family coming apart, so his vision is welcomed with open arms by Irving’s material. Williams is great with the details of Ted’s pretentious artistic whims, along with his addiction to the adulation he receives from his fans. Williams paints a gripping portrait of loss and emotional denial, and “Floor” is a steady cinematic affair, blessed with an ace cast and a commitment to keep Irving’s drama unpredictable and riveting.  Also decidedly Irvingesque is the sexual intimacy between the characters, portrayed with a clear eye by Williams. Marion and Eddie do not start their relationship through a hackneyed, “Mrs. Robinson” type of scenario, but refreshingly through Marion accidentally catching Eddie masturbating with her underwear. Williams also gets lots of mileage out of Ted’s unabashed nudity as he stomps around his property, even in front of complete strangers. Not too many movies are willing to show characters in honest sexual situations, and “Door” is at its best when showcasing the eroticism, whether it is awkward or beautiful, as it is and not stylizing the hell out of it, or losing backbone when it becomes a little strange, such as when Eddie and Marion’s relationship grows.  As “Door” slowly unfolds, Williams does trip a little trying to maintain Irving’s lyrical eccentricities. What starts as a fairly dark drama eventually tries to smuggle in some comedy (funny, but not always), and the characters begin to show that some critical backstory has been cleaved away, especially when Eddie’s adoration of Ted’s talents begins to melt away quickly as the summer progresses. He goes from shy fanboy to bitter rival in no time, throwing off the film’s steady rhythm. It isn’t enough to derail the movie completely, but it unravels the complex story that Irving has carefully built, and that’s a little disappointing. My Rating: B  "The Door in the Floor"  *** (out of four)  Rating: R (for strong sexuality and graphic images and language)  Running time: 1:51  John Irving's novels walk a tightrope between drama and comedy (and, fittingly, several of them feature circus performers). Leaping from sentiment to slapstick or from melodrama to mayhem can be so tricky that in "The World According to Garp" Irving resorted to bracketing the most horrific incident (a sexual assault) as a story within the story.  So, when a filmmaker adapts one of Irving's book by removing several legs from the narrative assembly, the whole thing can come tumbling down. Such is almost the case with "The Door in the Floor," which was adapted from a section of the novel "A Widow for One Year." In the book, that section takes place in 1958; but in the screenplay, the story is contemporized. The updated setting makes the life lessons that a married woman imparts to a sensitive boy seem quaint, and it renders the sexual shenanigans of her husband less transgressive than they would seem in the '50s. But the actor who plays the husband, Jeff Bridges, redeems this somber movie with another performance that confirms his status as Hollywood's most underrated star.  Bridges plays Ted Cole, a children's author who seems as beloved as Dr. Seuss but whose Freudian drawings more closely resemble Shel Silverstein's. Ted is a loquacious drunk and a shameless womanizer, but, as played by Bridges, he has a shaggy, uninhibited charm that stays a step ahead of his comeuppance. "I'm just an entertainer of children who likes to draw," he tells his fans at a Hamptons bookstore, and it's only later that we realize this is his standard invitation to groupies. The one person who sees through his act is his wife, Marion (Kim Basinger). Marion drags herself through their beachfront manse as if carrying a weight on her shoulders, and after we learn that the weight she carries is grief over the death of their teenage sons, she and Ted agree to a trial separation.  To keep Ted from being distracted by workaday chores, the couple hires a local boy to run errands for them. Sensitive prep schooler Eddie (Jon Foster) wants to be a writer like his hero Ted, but on those days when he is assigned to Marion's new apartment in town, he experiences a different sort of inspiration. When Marion intrudes on his private ardor (the first of two such oops! moments in this often-icky flick), she gives him a maternal speech about the normal urges of teenage boys that is straight out of midcentury film strips. And when the relationship soon evolves into a sexual affair, it has the dewy tone (and seaside ambiance) of "The Summer of '42."  When Ted finds out about the affair, a film that had the makings of a coming-of-age story or a predictable family drama becomes unusually complicated and nuanced. Rather than rage against his wife or the young interloper, Ted subtly humiliates Eddie - even while continuing his own philandering with the society matron (Mimi Rogers) who poses for his gruesome nude drawings. Observing the slow dissolution of the family is 4-year-old Ruth (Elle Fanning, the annoyingly precocious sister of Dakota), who grows into the main character of the Irving novel. Her puzzlement in the wake of her parents' break-up inspires Ted to write a story about "the sound of someone trying not to make a sound." This kind of writerly preciousness infects much of the film, while the backstory of the sons' death in a car accident is jarringly graphic and scenes like Ted's slapstick getaway from the spurned matron are merely crass.  In the end, "The Door in the Floor" doesn't know whose story it should be telling. Marion is alternately a depressive cipher and every boy's fantasy. Eddie is a cliche of a young man who yearns to be creative, yet we never see the talent or dedication that would suggest he is a true writer. Ted at least has the mixed blessing of brutal honesty, and in his one piece of advice to the young apprentice, he says that specific detail is the key to a good story. On that level, the flamboyant detail of Bridges' performance saves "The Door in the Floor" from its downbeat pacing and dissipated sympathies. Ted is no hero, but he leaps from the messy pages of this screenplay to become a human being.  The Door in the Floor  Reviewed by: Edward Douglas Rating: 7 out of 10 Cast: Jeff Bridges as Ted Cole  Kim Basinger as Marion Cole Jon Foster as Eddie O'Hare Elle Fanning as Ruth Cole Harvey Loomis as Dr. Loomis Bijou Phillips as Alice Mimi Rogers as Evelyn Vaughn Louis Arcella as Eduardo Gomez Amanda Posner as Frame Shop Clerk Robert LuPone as Mendelssohn Larry Pine as Interviewer John Rothman as Minty O'Hare Mike S. Ryan as Reception Fan Libby Langdon as Woman at Reception Rachel Style as Bookstore Assistant Story: Ted Cole (Bridges) is a children's book author and artist, who separates from his dysfunctional wife Marion (Kim Basinger) after the death of their two sons. Things get more complicated when he hires Eddie (Jon Foster), a college intern, who becomes obsessed with his wife, creating even more turmoil within their troubled family. Analysis: Based on the first third of John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year", The Door in the Floor is the latest drama to try to capture the stirring emotions of films like In the Bedroom and The House of Sand and Fog. Because it is John Irving, you would automatically expect something a bit richer with quirky characters and situations that you may not see in more traditional dramas. The story revolves around Ted and his shaky marriage that was so adversely affected by the death of their sons in a car accident, that his wife spends much of the day in a catatonic state. Ted's decision for a trial separation is done solely for him to use his artistic skills to lull willing female models into passive-aggressive affairs. Marion seems oblivious to Ted's philandering ways due to her grief, but their young daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning) has been the worst affected by her parents' behavior, since she can't seem to get the love of her mother that she needs, so instead, she obsesses over the pictures of her dead brothers that are scattered around the house. Maybe it's cathartic for the family to keep the boys in their memories, but it doesn't seem like a very healthy way of living. Then again, anyone familiar with Irving's The World According to Garp will remember that he already used a car accident to create turmoil within a family, so this isn't exactly new ground. When Eddie enters their life, he makes Marion feel wanted and loved again, but he also get caught in the mind games between the two, passing messages back and forth as he succumbs to their odd living situation, with each spouse alternating at the house a night at a time. It's obvious to all that Eddie reminds them of their sons who attended the same university. The premise of a college student having an affair with an older woman isn't exactly a new one, and it's impossible to not make comparisons with The Graduate or Carnal Knowledge, the latter which used a similar summer beachside setting. Eddie's growing obsession with Marion and their relationship is handled well, but it's already hard to empathize with Ted or Marion, so when Eddie betrays his boss by having an affair with his wife, it makes his character equally dubious.  Tod William's script is excellent, perfectly capturing the spirit of Irving's work, while allowing Bridges to make the most out of his quirky character, who is the best part of the movie. Although the nature of the story and movie is rather somber, Bridges elicits laughs from his every appearance—usually either in the nude or wearing what looks like some sort of African nightshirt. Bridges proves himself to be an amazingly versatile actor, able to handle the drama with a lighter touch, which makes him the most ideal actor to play a John Irving character since John Lithgow. This really is Bridges' best role since playing "The Dude" in The Big Lebowsky from the Brothers Coen. Basinger's character spends much of the movie in a morose frame of mind, so she doesn't really have much of an opportunity to show off her acting skills. There are only a few scenes between her and Bridges, so their relationship is primarily seen through their interactions with Eddie. These scenes between Foster and the veteran actors show off this young actor's promise, while the even younger Elle Fanning proves herself to be much cuter and more tolerable than her older sister Dakota. She is responsible for some of the movie's most memorable moments, like when she walks in her mother having sex with Eddie. Mimi Rodgers is also good in an underplayed role as Mrs. Vaughn, Ted's model with whom he has an affair, and she gives a daring full frontal nude scene that conveys her character's degradation at his hands. The first half of the movie is a bit slow and flat, as Eddie tries to find his way among this family and their grief, but there is a sudden change of tone in the second half, as the movie turns into a fast-paced comedy. Since this type of humor wasn't established earlier in the movie, it seems almost inappropriate to the serious direction it seems to be going. Much of the humor revolves around the subplot of Ted's affair with Mrs. Vaughn, which is important to establish his lack of character, but far too much time is spent resolving that part of the story, which is trivial compared to the central story. By the time we finally learn what happened to Ted and Marion's sons, the build-up has been diluted by the comedy, so it's not nearly as powerful or effective as it might have been.  Despite those pacing problems, the movie ends in the perfect place, but knowing that it covers only the first third of Irving's book will make you interested in picking up the book to see where the characters go from there. The Bottom Line: Fans of Jeff Bridges and John Irving will appreciate Tod Williams' efforts to bring this story to life, but others may be thrown by the eclectic nature of the movie's drastic jumps from drama to comedy. Then again, that makes The Door in the Floor even more of a John Irving work, and the way that these characters and their story comes together will provide a number of decent payoffs for those patient enough to accept the characters and their flaws. THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR / *** (R)  Focus Features presents a film written and directed by Tod Williams. Based on the novel A Widow for One Year by John Irving. Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexuality and graphic images and language).  BY ROGER EBERT  What is it about Jeff Bridges, the way he can say something nice in a way that doesn't sound so nice? How does he find that balance between the sunny optimism and the buried agenda? Early in "The Door in the Floor," playing an author named Ted Cole, he suggests to his wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), that they add a swimming pool to the lawn of their home in the East Hamptons. How do we know his proposal is like turning a knife in his wife's ribs?  I saw the movie a few days after re-watching one of Bridges' first performances, in "The Last Picture Show" (1971). More than 30 years later, he still has the same open face, the same placid smile, the same level voice that never seems to try very hard for emotion and the same ability to suggest the depths and secrets of his character. In this story of a wounded marriage, Kim Basinger is well-chosen as his target in an emotional duel. There can be something hurt and vulnerable about her, a fear around the eyes, a hopeful sweetness that doesn't seem to expect much. Here she transgresses moral boundaries by deliberately seducing a 16-year-old boy, and yet still seems to be the victim.  The movie is about a marriage between two smart people who are too afraid, or perhaps too cruel, to fight out in the open. They play a deep game of psychological chicken, all the more hurtful because they know so well what buttons to push. We learn eventually that their two sons were killed in a car crash, that Marion in some ways blames Ted, that in middle life they've had a daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), to try to heal the loss and that the loss was not healed. Now Ted proposes to hire a young student as his assistant for the summer. This is Eddie (Jon Foster). Because we have already visited the upstairs corridor lined with photographs of their two dead boys, we notice immediately that Eddie looks a lot like the older boy. Marion notices, too, as she is intended to.  The movie is based on the first third of John Irving's 1998 novel A Widow for One Year, which is mostly about Ruth growing up and developing problems of her own. This story focuses on the relationship of her parents. Ted Cole is a womanizer, a failed serious novelist who has found success with children's books, which he illustrates himself; his illustrations require female models, who he recruits from the neighborhood, and who only gradually discover that they are to be nude, and to have sex with Ted. Marion, meanwhile, is stuck in a sad blankness, unable to stir herself back into life.  The boy Eddie is smart, serious, ambitious, headed for a good school and very impressed to be working for a famous writer. Ted has little for him to do, except to drive him to and from liaisons with Mrs. Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), one of his current mistresses. Ted can't drive himself because his license has been suspended.  During the course of the summer, Ted says he has been "thinking," which in a marriage usually means trouble, and he suggests a "trial separation," which usually means the trial will be successful. He times this suggestion for soon after Eddie comes to work for him, and Eddie finds himself dividing his time between the beach house and the house in town. That this is part of Ted's plan to passively urge his wife into adultery is obvious to Marion if not to Eddie, who becomes sexually obsessed with the older woman. She catches him one day masturbating with the inspiration of her bra and panties.  I don't know what I think -- or what I'm supposed to think -- about the sex they eventually have. Certainly Basinger is perfectly modulated in the way she talks with Eddie, soothes his guilt over the masturbation scene, asks him to dinner and eventually to bed.  Young men have daydreams about older women like this, just as older women have nightmares about the young men. But the director, Tod Williams, pays unseemly attention to their sex itself. The film should be about their transgression, not their technique. The relationship between Marion and Eddie is the least satisfactory in the movie, because the movie isn't really about it -- it's about how Ted and Marion use it.  Ted is a thoroughgoing SOB. Marion may be evil, too, but she's nicer about it. The way Ted treats the Mimi Rogers character ventures beyond cruelty into sadism, and Williams makes a mistake by allowing its tension to be released in a quasi-slapstick scene where she tries to run him over in her SUV. That's letting him off too easy. But Williams handles the main line of the story, the war between Ted and Marion, clearly and strongly; you may not always hurt the one you love, but you certainly know how to.  Bridges plays his role with an untidy beard, wild hair and a wardrobe that ranges from ratty bathrobes to casual nudity in front of strangers. He's doing something with his lower jaw, as if he's talking with a mouthful of water, and it makes him seem more like a predator.  Basinger has to internalize more. As Eddie, Jon Foster, the young actor, is given a good character, but the screenplay denies him either an objective or a release; all he can do is escape. Ruth, the little girl, meanwhile, watches disturbing sights with big eyes, screams at the top of her lungs and will grow up to be the heroine of a John Irving novel, not something you would wish lightly upon a child.  Stunning 'Door' of Oscar caliber By Christian Toto At 54, Jeff Bridges is losing the elasticity of his youth. Perhaps now more people will see past his handsome visage and realize few actors are as gifted or graceful on-screen.  Mr. Bridges follows his underrated turn in last year's "Seabiscuit" with another stunner in "The Door in the Floor." It's bold, yet subtle work, a fully imagined performance that never feels insubstantial.  It's the reason why Oscar statuettes are cast in the first place.  The film, an adaptation of the first third of John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year," needs all the crusty charisma Mr. Bridges can muster. The actor plays Ted Cole, a disillusioned author whose life has devolved into a morass of creepy sexuality and indifferent parenting.  Writer-director Tod Williams transports the novel's setting from the 1950s to the present but otherwise leaves Mr. Irving's peculiar rhythms unperturbed.  Ted (Mr. Bridges) lives what seems like an idyllic life in East Hampton, N.Y. He writes and illustrates children's books out of his home and is married to Marion (Oscar winner Kim Basinger), who has the kind of ageless beauty plastic surgeons get paid big bucks to duplicate.  A few years back, though, the couple lost their two sons in an accident — and nothing has been the same since.  Even their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth, can't resurrect the joy in their lives.  Enter Eddie (Jon Foster of 2001's "Life Is a House"), a young writer who signs up to serve as Ted's writing assistant for the summer.  Eddie doesn't learn much about writing, but his sexual education is another matter. He develops a sizable crush on Marion, and she, numbed by her loss, gives in to his passion.  Meanwhile, young Ruth (Elle Fanning), whose character looms larger in Mr. Irving's novel, is left adrift.  We're left wondering why Ted allowed the romance to start in the first place, or even if he orchestrated it on the sly to help separate himself from Marion. It's clear infidelity isn't off his menu, given his mean-spirited fling with a lonely local (Mimi Rogers).  Mr. Irving excels in developing relatable characters who behave in ways which are intolerable in just about any context imaginable. Mr. Williams works along that sympathetic wavelength, cautiously layering the performances until we have bonded with these flawed people against our better judgment.  Ted's personal breakdown late in the film, complete with a chaotic chase involving Miss Rogers, might seem ludicrous if Mr. Williams hadn't so deftly established the motives beforehand.  Miss Basinger floats through her role with few emotive flourishes. Yet that's precisely the kind of work her role demands.  Equally suited to the material is Mr. Williams, who until now had only the 1998 film "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" to his directorial credit.  The young filmmaker creates a movie that feels like a novel in all the right ways, from its luxurious Hamptons setting to its complicated moral equations.  Adapting bulky novels to the screen is never an easy task. Mr. Williams improved his odds by deleting two-thirds of the source material. That the finished product seems so fully of one mind is a testament to Mr. Irving's pen as well as Mr. Williams' lens. That the pair have Mr. Bridges at their disposal completes the creative trifecta.  ***1/2  WHAT: "The Door in the Floor"  RATING: R (Harsh language, sexuality, violence and alcohol use)  CREDITS: Written and directed by Tod Williams. Based on a novel by John Irving. Original Music by Marcelo Zarvos. Cinematography by Terry Stacey.  RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes  WEB SITE: www.thedoorinthefloor.com  MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS  DEEP EMOTIONAL WOUNDS OPEN IN 'DOOR'  111 minutes | Rated: R LIMITED: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 EXPANDS: Friday, July 23, 2004  Written & directed by Tod Williams  Starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Elle Fanning, Bijou Phillips, Mimi Rogers, Jon Foster, Donna Murphy OTHER REVIEWS/COMING SOON  Jeff Bridges  Kim Basinger  Elle Fanning  Bijou Phillips  Mimi Rogers  Donna Murphy  Bridges, Basinger explore the shards that remain of a couple's shattered lives after their sons' deaths  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger give a pair of extraordinary performances in "The Door in the Floor" as a couple whose souls and whose marriage have never recovered from the deaths of their teenage sons six years before. Their lives are like broken teacups glued back together -- they may look undamaged from a distance, but up close it's clear they're now made up of psychological shatters and shards that can never be the same again. Not that they haven't tried to move forward. Hoping to retard their overwhelming sense of loss, they even had a daughter -- played by 6-year-old Ellie Fanning, the not-quite-as-natural little sister of uber-talented 8-year-old Dakota ("Man On Fire") -- who seems to subconsciously understand her function in the family. The film opens with the kind of subtly captivating, fact-of-life moment that defines its emotional timbre: The curious, melancholy little girl sneaks out of bed in what seems to be a midnight ritual, quietly drags a chair across a wooden floor and climbs up to study one of several dozen artful black-and-white photos hung in a hallway shrine to the dead brothers she never knew -- this one a sanguine shot of the boys at just about her own age. But as writer-director Tod Williams ("The Adventures of Sebastian Cole") soon reveals in this adaptation from part of John Irving's "Widow for One Year," this family of broken china is starting to come unglued. Bridges plays Ted Cole, a Hampton-bohemian best-selling author and illustrator of dark, esoteric, metaphorical children's books. He's a dog-eared man whose untreated, unfocused antipathy has begun to emerge in his increasingly vitriolic nude paintings of local married women, with whom he has quiet affairs and then discards unceremoniously. Basinger is his wife Marion, who is disappearing into a fog of lingering sorrow and instability until Ted hires an assistant he doesn't really need -- a admiring and nervously polite, 18-year-old aspiring author named Eddie (Jon Foster, younger brother of "Liberty Height's" Ben Foster), whose transparent sexual obsession with Marion rekindles something in her shifting psyche. Jealousy and bitterness, forgotten tenderness and echoing heartbreak percolate under the couple's level-headed surface in ways that may lead to healing -- or may be disastrous -- as Eddie becomes a pawn in their trial separation. But he's also coming into his own as a person to be reckoned with, more aware of the costs of this rift than either Ted or Marion. The many rich facets of the characters are what fuels the film's absorbing intelligence and depth -- especially the evolving dynamic between Ivy-League-bound Eddie and functionally off-kilter, caftan-disheveled Ted as they move from mentor and admirer to testing each other's mettle. In one scene Ted explains that he's throwing Eddie out of the house, then offers him a friendly beer while further stating that he won't be giving the kid a lift to the ferry. This dichotomy of affection is part of how their relationship functions, and each of the film's characters has vulnerabilities that are in constant flux. "The Door in the Floor" hits a couple narrative bumps that break its stride a little -- especially in the progression of Marion's uncomfortably affair with young Eddie, who she uses as a lover and a surrogate son. The liaison begins so awkwardly it's borderline absurd and progresses through some bad choices that are irresponsible at best, unbelievable at worst. But even this is based in character: Marion is in such a peculiar, fragile place emotionally that her indulgence of Eddie is in many ways both therapeutic and self-destructive. Most satisfying (although that may be a bad choice of words) is that the story does not come to a tidy resolution, but, rather like both real life and Ted Cole's odd kids' books, leaves one wondering, for better or worse, what lies in its characters' futures. Review: 'Door in Floor' beautiful, flawless Adaptation of Irving features great acting, elegant directing By Christy Lemire (AP) -- The first 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A Widow for One Year" provide the basis for "The Door in the Floor." The result is a film that couldn't be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy. Like the best adaptations of Irving's books -- especially "The World According to Garp" -- "The Door in the Floor" really captures the author's method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material -- for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day -- but he kept Irving's spirit and much of his language intact. Williams' first film was another coming-of-age story, 1999's "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole." This has a sort of "Summer of '42" feel to it, with the faded pastels and pale light of its Hamptons beach setting, and its relationship between teenager Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) and the older, married Marion Cole (Kim Basinger) with whom he spends a summer. "The Door in the Floor" also will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a more recent film, "In the Bedroom" from 2001. Both are anguished, excellent, and both accurately convey the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting, ways. Marion is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a children's book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, New York, in hopes of starting over and moving on. Ted's method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he's telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily -- effectively abandoning her when she needs him most. As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he's lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer Eddie, a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas' teacher, for the summer. A stranger in the house Basinger's character begins an affair with a high school boy (Jon Foster) who joins her household in "The Door in the Floor."  Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness when he arrives and doesn't quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he's so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.) We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted's schlep work, but to service Marion's needs, as well. He becomes the sons she's lost and the lover she's pushed away, and we don't know until the very end whether this was Ted's intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events. That Ted is aware that his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie's many surprising quirks. Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father's absence -- Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of "I Am Sam" -- and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly. Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn't as clear-cut as he originally thought. Throughout the process, though, he never loses his innate sweetness. He has some graphic -- though realistically awkward -- sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since "L.A. Confidential," which earned her an Oscar. Some will gripe that she's not really "acting," but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film's emotion, are evidence that less really can be more. "The Door in the Floor," a Focus Features release, is rated R for strong sexuality and graphic images, and language.  Basinger Says Tears in New Film Were Real  NEW YORK - Kim Basinger (news) says the tears that she had to shed in "The Door in the Floor" after her character's two sons are killed were genuine.  The actress said she could relate to the character because she herself is a mother.  "After giving birth, you can no longer say it's the character's response," she said in an interview with AP Radio.  "The Door in the Floor" is based on the John Irving novel "A Widow for One Year." It is the story of an older woman, played by Basinger, who starts having an affair with a teenage boy, played by Jon Foster, who starts working around her house in East Hampton, N.Y.  Basinger admitted it could have been awkward doing some scenes with Foster, but she said he was a professional.  "This was a great family of players," Basinger said. "It could have been uncomfortable. Everything I did with Jon was just, 'Hey, it's a part of the characters.'"  "The Door in the Floor" opened Wednesday.  Shattered Lives  by Diana Saenger One always imagines writers of children’s books as kind, gentle, imaginative people who have an insightful connection to kids. In The Door in the Floor, adapted from A Widow for One Year by John Irving, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is not that kind of person. Perhaps Ted was at one time more the picture-perfect, kid-friendly sort of guy, but life in the beach community of East Hampton, New York, has become anything but normal. For starters, he and his wife Marion (Kim Basinger) lost their two teenage sons in a car accident. They each blame the other for the deaths; but like two new flower shoots in a pot, Ted gets re-rooted in his life as a writer and painter, while Marion -- a lifeless, mere shadow of her former self -- barely survives. An unwilling pawn in the tragedy is the Cole's 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning). A delicate child who came along after her brothers’ deaths, Ruth has unfulfilled needs she must compensate for. She understands that her mother is afraid to love again for fear she couldn’t survive another deep loss; so Ruth turns oblivious to her father’s peculiar lifestyle and subsists in his world of make believe. Marion and Ted no longer live together and take turns having Ruth on alternate days. Although he still loves Marion, Ted has given up on healing the gaps in their marriage. His infidelities, extreme behaviors, and nudist tendencies are not positive reinforcements to mending a relationship.  So alone in her sorrow, Marion’s vulnerability is exploited when Ted hires Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster), a summer intern, who becomes infatuated with Marion. The two begin a sexual relationship that Ted ignores and Marion looses herself in.  A film that languishes with tragedy, comedy and romance may be difficult for some actors, but Bridges and Basinger are both extraordinary in their roles. Ted shields himself from his feelings by grasping onto everything around him, and Bridges expertly taps into the charismatic and impish character. However, I saw “a little too much” of Bridges in his nude scenes.  Basinger is amazingly beautiful, but even more so in this role, and like a delicate piece of fine china with a hairline crack, her beauty serves the part even more. Marion is full of guilt, anger and a need to be loved in spite of not being able to love again herself. Bassinger makes us see these needs so completely we understand her way of dealing with her grief. Newcomer Jon Foster does a great job balancing the qualities of an innocent young intern who expects to earn a few bucks for college and instead takes on the problems of manhood. Elle Fanning is sister to Dakota Fanning (I Am Sam), and it’s hard to believe there are two children from the same family so gifted as young actors. She not only charms the audience, but her fellow actors as well. Basinger said about her, “Elle is needless to say magically gifted. She is the most beautiful definition of a child. I simply fell in love with her.” Irving is a master at penning soulful and complicated stories that intrigue and entertain at the same time. While there are some plot holes and moments that seem to go astray in The Door in the Floor, watching Basinger and Bridges expose their characters’ flaws and inner torment so powerfully is a pleasure. 'The Door in the Floor' Nuclear family meltdown  JOHN IRVING NOVELS have proven very hit-and-miss in terms of screen adaptability. If The Door in the Floor, derived from A Widow for One Year, rates as one of the better efforts, that may be in large part because it whittles down the book's sprawl to one compact little narrative. Director-scenarist Tod Williams preserves only the section having to do with the breakup of a couple's marriage, thus rendering the book's central character a devastated but inarticulate bystander (she's four years old here); he also shifts the setting from the 1950s to our current era. Those more flamboyant streaks of humor, violence, and wild fate one might expect from Irving on the page are pretty much MIA, but in narrowing the focus, the movie achieves a dramatic precision. Aspiring writer Eddie (Jon Foster) is nervous and starstruck upon arriving at the East Hampton home where he'll spend the summer as an assistant to famous children's author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges). The latter is friendly but a bit much for the gawky teenager to take at first, what with Ted being a casual nudist, not-especially-discreet womanizer, and brutal racquetball opponent. More disturbing, however, are the signs that all is not well in Ted's household. He and wife Marion (Kim Basinger) seem to be leading nearly separate lives, with the parenting of little Ruth (Elle Fanning, very good in a non-cute performance) falling to her dad by default. Marion, it emerges, has withdrawn from everything – even her remaining maternal instincts – since their two sons died in a car accident. Even her Mrs. Robinson-like seduction of virginal Eddie can't quite halt the slow encroachment of an emotional ice age. As Marion's pain becomes clearer, so do genial Ted's considerable faults, making for one tough summer of maturation for their wide-eyed guest. Somber but not without comedy or intrigue, The Door in the Floor provides Bridges with one of his best recent roles – something that would be the worth the admission price even if the movie as a whole weren't so quietly rewarding. In a just world, the competent Basinger and perennially undervalued Mimi Rogers (somewhat wasted as Ted's latest conquest, though fans will enjoy seeing her stark naked once again) would swap roles. Still, this oasis of adult intelligence amid the floating summer behemoths merits pretty much unconditional gratitude. (Dennis Harvey)  'Door' reveals marriage drowning in grief  By Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News Where you come down on The Door in the Floor, the latest big- screen adaptation of a John Irving novel, may depend on how attached you are to A Widow For One Year, the 1998 book on which the movie is based.  Writer/director Tod Williams has taken a third of Irving's novel and turned it into a movie. For some of the novel's fans,  Door in the Floor may generate inevitable feelings of disappointment, like those that might result from watching only the first act of a three-act play.  But if you free yourself from such expectations, you'll find a thoughtfully made and somber movie about the way grief burrows into the lives of characters who are ill-equipped to handle it. You'll also find a grandly rumpled performance by Jeff Bridges, as Ted Cole, author and illustrator of highly celebrated children's books, including the one that gives the movie its title.  Ted and his estranged wife Marion (Kim Basinger) are attempting, rather badly, to cope with the death of two-teenage sons, bright Exeter students meant to carry on a shining family future. Ted and Marion have made the mistake of trying to right things by having another child, the somewhat precocious Ruth (Elle Fanning), who's now 4.  Ted tries to be a decent dad. Basinger's Marion has gone round the bend as far as parenthood is concerned. She's distanced herself from her husband and her child, as if some part of her must forever remain untouchable - maybe because it's not there any more. Maybe it never was. That's just where the movie gets interesting. We're looking at a marriage that probably didn't sour suddenly, but began to curdle long before the boys' deaths.  The story revolves around a catalyst that further agitates Ted and Marion's lives. Exeter student Eddie (Jon Foster) signs on as Ted's summer apprentice. Before the summer's out, he has an affair with Marion, who's perhaps trying to recapture something about her sons and purge herself of their memory.  From the start, it's clear that Bridges' Ted will be a force with which to reckon. He displays himself nude in front of young Eddie, an intimidation tactic disguised as nonchalance. He lures women into his life by sketching (and ultimately degrading) them. He drinks too much. He's unable fully to cope with his 4-year-old daughter. His work is quite good, but he's smug about it.  Eddie's blossoming libido leads to some embarrassing moments for him. And he's constantly reminded of the dead Cole boys, whose pictures fill the house that Ted and Marion share - on alternate evenings. When he's not home, Ted dallies with Mrs. Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), the latest sexual color on his smudged emotional palette.  The flamboyant Ted likes to traipse around his East Hampton home in a kaftan. Bridges makes Ted totally believable. In scenes when Ted's emotional shields are lowered, Bridges shows a shocking vulnerability. It seems as if he's lived in this character all his life.  Basinger gives one of her better performances. Foster keeps pace in the less rewarding role of an adolescent swimming in waters way over his head. Williams (who also directed The Adventures of Sebastian Cole) plays much of the final third of the movie for laughs, but does better with dramatic moments. As with most of Irving's stories, comedy and tragedy mingle freely.  At times, the film seems a little too quirky. The sexual relationship between Eddie and Marion amounts to an obvious way of dealing with complex emotions.  But there's real feeling to be found here, and the movie's imperfections tend to blend with the flaws of characters who don't have a firm grip on their lives. Besides, when Bridges finally tells how his sons died, you'll be watching as fine a piece of acting as you're likely to see all year.  A masterwork? Not really, but Door in the Floor has been made with devotion to the spirit of the material that inspired it. Think of it as an awfully good try.  Director: Tod Williams Producers: Michael Corrente, Anne Carey, Ted Hope Screenplay: Tod Williams, based on A Window for One Year by John Irving Cinematography: Terry Stacey Music: Marcelo Zarvos U.S. Distributor: Focus Features  As a character study that examines a pair of reprehensible individuals, The Door in the Floor does an excellent job. The problem with the film is simple: how many people want to spend nearly two hours in the company of such characters. The viewer's supposed surrogate in the film, a 16-year old boy by the name of Eddie (Jon Foster), is so ineffectual as to be almost invisible. What starts out with the earmarks of a coming-of-age story turns into a tale of the disintegration of the marriage between two disagreeable personalities. If that's your kind of movie (and it is, to a degree, mine), you will find more here than unrelieved bleakness and boredom. It is certainly unlike typical summer fare.  The two major characters personify nearly every unsavory characteristic inherent in human nature. Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges at his scraggliest), a well-known author of children's books, is living a dissolute life. A perpetual drunkard and debaser of women, he spends most of his waking hours wandering around his house in a bathrobe, playing racquetball in a converted barn, and painting nudes. His wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), is little better. She's a bad mother to her 4-year old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), is emotionally closed-off, and ends up seducing an underage boy who bears a creepy resemblance to her dead teenage son. Her marriage to Ted is on the rocks. It has been unstable for some time, never having recovered from the tragic accident that claimed their sons, Tom and Tim.  Eddie enters this stinking stew of emotional wounds like a Christian being fed to the lions. He's a relative innocent - a 16-year old virgin with few social skills but a burgeoning desire to write. He considers it a great honor to have been chosen by Ted as his assistant, but his attention soon switches to Marion. He develops an infatuation for her which she promptly exploits. Meanwhile, Ted calculates how to use his wife's indiscretion against her in a potential custody suit.  The Door in the Floor appears to transpire in a time warp. The setting is clearly delineated as present-day, yet, based on the state of technology, the Coles seem to be stuck in the 1980s. Ted still writes his stories on a typewriter (for unspecified reasons, he resists the idea of getting a computer - "maybe for my next book," he remarks at one point), uses a rotary phone instead of a cell or portable push-button, and drives cars that are only a little newer than the phone.  The film arrests our attention in the same way that a wreck does. Ted and Marion may have survived the accident that killed their sons, but their marriage did not. It has lain in ruins for years, and all it takes is one catalyst - the arrival of Eddie into the twisted dynamic that has become their interaction - to alter things permanently. As relationship autopsies go, this one is effective, although the scenes I thought worked the best are the ones where Ted mentors Eddie on writing - even if some of his advice is brutal.  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger give powerful performances. Bridges is always good at this sort of tortured role, and Basinger returns to the form she showed in 8 Mile and L.A. Confidential. Opposite them, Jon Foster is out of his depth, and that's one of the film's problems. The actor has too little presence to hold his own against Bridges and Basinger. Mimi Rogers has an odd, semi-comedic part as one of Ted's models (she and Basinger bear all, striking another blow for the equality of aging women where nudity is concerned), and Elle Fanning (the younger sister of Dakota) is striking as Ruth.  The Door in the Floor concludes on a contrived note, possibly because this is the kind of a story that doesn't have a conventional beginning or ending. The director/writer (adapting from the first third of a novel by John Irving) is Tod Williams, whose only previous credit is The Adventures of Sebastian Cole. It's hard to qualify his sophomore effort as an unconditional success. For the most part, The Door in the Floor is well-made, and it held my attention throughout, but this is one of those motion pictures where it's easier to admire than like the final result. Nevertheless, I recommend it for those who are attracted to dark films about dissolute characters with tragic backgrounds.  The Door in the Floor ( R ) I was beginning to think adult audiences were forever exiled to a wasteland of tweener romps and summer movie behemoths.  But Tod Williams' ``The Door in the Floor,'' an adaptation of the first 202 pages of John Irving's 592-page 1998 novel ``A Widow for One Year,'' changes the landscape completely.  A beautifully acted examination of the bedeviling and perversely inspiring legacy of family tragedy, it's one of the most sophisticated American films of the year. It's also a surprise to me. I was not particularly impressed with Williams' 1998 debut film, ``The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,'' a comic-tragic coming-of-age tale that in retrospect now appears to have much in common with the work and vision of Irving (``The World According to Garp,'' ``The Cider House Rules'').  ``The Door in the Floor,'' which Williams adapted for the screen, is another of Irving's eccentric, extended family sagas, full of myths and symbols and sex and death.  While Irving's story is set in 1958, the film is set in the present, summer on East Hampton, Long Island. Like the book, it tells the story of Ted (Jeff Bridges) and Marion Cole (Kim Basinger), an estranged married couple who hire a handsome 16-year-old Exeter student to help around the house.   Eddie O'Hare (Boston native Jon Foster), the young man, is interested in pursuing a writing career. Ted, a famous author of children's books, including the bestseller ``The Door in the Floor,'' is a compulsive philanderer, heavy drinker and squash player. He has lost his driver's license and needs to be squired around.   Several years before, Ted and Marion witnessed the deaths of their two sons, young Adonises also attending Exeter, in a freak traffic accident, a favorite, if that's the word, Irving motif.  Although they have a daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister), a child deliberately conceived after the accident, Marion is too depressed to take much interest in her.  As Ted anticipated, Eddie becomes infatuated and obsessed with the beautiful, sad Marion. Soon, more or less with Ted's silent consent, Marion and Eddie embark upon a torrid affair that is admittedly idealized. (O'Hare's sexual prowess is positively rabbity). That Eddie is more or less the age of her late sons adds an Oedipal frisson to their relationship.  Eddie also becomes the neglected Ruth's surrogate brother, a replacement for the older brothers she thinks and asks about incessantly and only knows by their photographs and the stories her parents share. Ted, meanwhile, also illustrates his own books and enjoys sketching portraits of local girls and their mothers. He likes persuading the adult women to pose nude for him. As the action begins, he is engaged in a sadomasochistic liaison with Evelyn Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), a haughty, married woman.  Like Irving's fiction, ``Door in the Floor'' has a visionary richness that sets it apart as a work of art. On one level, the film explores the mysterious threshold between real life and fiction. Death has rendered Ted and Marion's boys unreal in spite of the photographic remains they have left behind.  Ted's stories have a rich psychological resonance and are often built upon ``found'' sentences. In one scene, Ruth tells her father of hearing ``a sound of someone trying not to make a sound,'' a line he instantly co-opts (readers of Irving's novel know Ruth grows up to be a famous writer). The squid ink Ted uses for his nude portraits has a notably foul smell.  One of the meanings of the film's title is revealed only at the very end. Ted's pornographic images of Evelyn in one hilarious scene are scattered through the neighborhood by an evil wind (Evelyn's rage will remind some of the Lizzie Grubman affair). Likewise, the photographs of the dead boys turn the Cole country house into a virtual mausoleum.  But what really sends ``Door in the Floor' over the top is the acting, which is certain to be remembered at awards season.  Ted Cole may be the most complex husband and father, not to mention artist, to grace an American movie. In a richly nuanced, often both literally and figuratively naked performance, Bridges makes this monster, if not lovable, at least undeniably human.  The recently divorced Basinger, too, has never been better or more radiant, not even in her Academy Award-winning turn in ``L.A. Confidential.'' She transforms Marion's morbid depression and withdrawal into a form of ravenous sexual longing.  With this achievement, director Williams, whose next project is an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's ``To Have and Have Not,'' leaps to the head of the line.  Door in the Floor, The A Film Review by James Berardinelli  United States, 2004 U.S. Release Date: 7/14/04 (limited) Running Length: 1:50 MPAA Classification: R (Nudity, sex, profanity, mature themes) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Cast: Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Mimi Rogers, Bijou Phillips, Elle Fanning Director: Tod Williams Producers: Michael Corrente, Anne Carey, Ted Hope Screenplay: Tod Williams, based on A Window for One Year by John Irving Cinematography: Terry Stacey Music: Marcelo Zarvos U.S. Distributor: Focus Features  As a character study that examines a pair of reprehensible individuals, The Door in the Floor does an excellent job. The problem with the film is simple: how many people want to spend nearly two hours in the company of such characters. The viewer's supposed surrogate in the film, a 16-year old boy by the name of Eddie (Jon Foster), is so ineffectual as to be almost invisible. What starts out with the earmarks of a coming-of-age story turns into a tale of the disintegration of the marriage between two disagreeable personalities. If that's your kind of movie (and it is, to a degree, mine), you will find more here than unrelieved bleakness and boredom. It is certainly unlike typical summer fare.  The two major characters personify nearly every unsavory characteristic inherent in human nature. Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges at his scraggliest), a well-known author of children's books, is living a dissolute life. A perpetual drunkard and debaser of women, he spends most of his waking hours wandering around his house in a bathrobe, playing racquetball in a converted barn, and painting nudes. His wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), is little better. She's a bad mother to her 4-year old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning), is emotionally closed-off, and ends up seducing an underage boy who bears a creepy resemblance to her dead teenage son. Her marriage to Ted is on the rocks. It has been unstable for some time, never having recovered from the tragic accident that claimed their sons, Tom and Tim.  Eddie enters this stinking stew of emotional wounds like a Christian being fed to the lions. He's a relative innocent - a 16-year old virgin with few social skills but a burgeoning desire to write. He considers it a great honor to have been chosen by Ted as his assistant, but his attention soon switches to Marion. He develops an infatuation for her which she promptly exploits. Meanwhile, Ted calculates how to use his wife's indiscretion against her in a potential custody suit.  The Door in the Floor appears to transpire in a time warp. The setting is clearly delineated as present-day, yet, based on the state of technology, the Coles seem to be stuck in the 1980s. Ted still writes his stories on a typewriter (for unspecified reasons, he resists the idea of getting a computer - "maybe for my next book," he remarks at one point), uses a rotary phone instead of a cell or portable push-button, and drives cars that are only a little newer than the phone.  The film arrests our attention in the same way that a wreck does. Ted and Marion may have survived the accident that killed their sons, but their marriage did not. It has lain in ruins for years, and all it takes is one catalyst - the arrival of Eddie into the twisted dynamic that has become their interaction - to alter things permanently. As relationship autopsies go, this one is effective, although the scenes I thought worked the best are the ones where Ted mentors Eddie on writing - even if some of his advice is brutal.  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger give powerful performances. Bridges is always good at this sort of tortured role, and Basinger returns to the form she showed in 8 Mile and L.A. Confidential. Opposite them, Jon Foster is out of his depth, and that's one of the film's problems. The actor has too little presence to hold his own against Bridges and Basinger. Mimi Rogers has an odd, semi-comedic part as one of Ted's models (she and Basinger bear all, striking another blow for the equality of aging women where nudity is concerned), and Elle Fanning (the younger sister of Dakota) is striking as Ruth.  The Door in the Floor concludes on a contrived note, possibly because this is the kind of a story that doesn't have a conventional beginning or ending. The director/writer (adapting from the first third of a novel by John Irving) is Tod Williams, whose only previous credit is The Adventures of Sebastian Cole. It's hard to qualify his sophomore effort as an unconditional success. For the most part, The Door in the Floor is well-made, and it held my attention throughout, but this is one of those motion pictures where it's easier to admire than like the final result. Nevertheless, I recommend it for those who are attracted to dark films about dissolute characters with tragic backgrounds.  Review: 'Door In The Floor' Is Moody Mystery Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger Play Tortured Couple Debra A. Scott, Staff Writer "The Door In The Floor" must have sounded a lot better on paper that it ended up on the screen.  The title alone, for me, was misleading. With the moody setting, mysterious circumstances and quirky characters, I was expecting a psychological horror movie or at least a spine-tingling mystery.  What we end up with is a meandering story of a marriage on the rocks and how tragedy can tear us apart when we need each other the most.  The film is all the more disappointing because "The Door In The Floor" was taken from John Irving's popular novel, "A Widow For A Year." Irving is a talented writer who can take unusual situations and find the humanity and the comedy in them. There is nothing funny about this film -- except maybe the unconventional children's writer's proclivity for stripping down nude anywhere he wants and showering outside the house.  Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), the writer, and his wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), live in the hauntingly beautiful community of East Hampton in New York. Their home overlooks the ocean with all of its mysteries and volatility. Their marriage has been strained almost beyond repair by the deaths of their teen sons. They even had another child, Ruth (Elle Fanning), in an effort to recapture the momentum and joy of their previous lives. But they only succeed in making the girl obsessed with the ghosts of her brothers who live in her parents.  A young student named Eddie (Jon Foster) bursts into their lives as Ted's assistant, but his boss' diversions leaves Eddie with time to indulge in his sexual attraction to Marion.  "The Door In The Floor" keeps teasing the audience with promises of some big revelation, but it never really delivers. It peters out at the end and you really don't have any empathy for any of the characters.  The R rating is appropriate in this case. There are some pretty frank sex scenes and an uncomfortable subplot with Mimi Rogers as Mrs. Vaughn -- a "Fatal Attraction" type of woman who models for Ted and wants more.  Bridges' performance is the most interesting part of the film. He runs around on his bicycle with a floppy straw hat and caftans and indulges in self-involved, hedonistic acts.  "A Door In The Floor" is not a complete disaster, but it just isn't very compelling. You'd be better off reading Irving's novel and using your imagination.  Bridges', Basinger's 'Door'  Rated R for language, strong sexuality and graphic images  Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes  Written and directed by Tod Williams  By JEFFREY WESTHOFF  The Northwest Herald  "The Door in the Floor" is a film about child abuse.  The filmmakers either don't realize this or don't have the courage to admit it. But any feeling person who watches "Door in the Floor" won't care about the miseries the main characters bring upon themselves, but about the mental anguish they are causing the 4-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) unfortunate enough to orbit their perverse lives of self-loathing.  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger play a couple whose marriage has foundered since the death of their college-age sons. Hoping to ease the pain, they had another child, Ruth, now 4. But Ruth failed to cheer them up, so she wanders the house looking at the many photos of the brothers she never knew and makes such morose statements as "Mommy's sadder" and "Tell me what dead is."  Marion Cole (Basinger) has become all but comatose with grief. Ted Cole (Bridges) is a famous children's author who has lost his inspiration. Now he spends most of his time seducing the women of their small New England island after asking to sketch them.  Summer nears, and as it often does in such portentous stories, summer is a season of life-altering events. These events begin when Ted hires a recent high school graduate, Eddie O'Hare, as his driver (Ted lost his license after numerous DUIs). Eddie arrives shortly after Ted and Marion have agreed to live in separate houses.  Eddie has always idolized Ted, and he is shattered to find the author of the classic children's tale "The Door in the Floor" is a drunken philanderer.  He sympathizes with Marion. Soon those feelings are stronger than sympathy, and Marion is enough of an emotional wreck to take advantage of the boy and the love he wants to give.  If you haven't figured it out by now, "The Door on the Floor" is based on a John Irving novel, "A Widow for One Year." Tod Williams directs the film from his own adaptation of Irving's novel, again proving that Irving's themes fail to translate into film.  But just so we know the movie is literary, the art comments on itself when Ted says, "Everything in fiction is a tool. Even death. These are like different colors on an artist's palette."  And just in case we don't understand one of the title's meanings, a helpful grad student shows up to analyze Ted's work (and, hence, how filmgoers should interpret it).  "The Door in the Floor" is filled with symbols and symbols of symbols within symbols. Because of this we are supposed to find poignancy in Marion's seduction of a 17-year-old boy. When she says Eddie reminds her of her dead sons, she adds metaphoric incest and necrophilia to her literal statutory rape. I doubt anyone would find it poignant if Ted were seducing a 17-year-old girl.  No one pays much attention to little Ruth as she witnesses all this sexual trauma. And she can't help but witness it because Dad walks around nude and Mom leaves her bedroom door open when she and Eddie try something especially kinky.  We are supposed to care as Eddie becomes a man, as Ted realizes he is acting like a boy and as Marion realizes she has deep issues. But these are adults who don't feel accountable for their actions. The tragic figure here is Ruth. She's too young to realize it. The adults in her life – and that includes the filmmakers – should realize it, but they have abandoned her.  Jeff Bridges crafts fine performance in 'Door' By GARY THOMPSON As Marlon Brando recently reminded us, we like to wait for an actor to die before giving him his due. That's seems a bit stingy, so let me take the opportunity, while Jeff Bridges is still breathing, to point out that he is a very good actor. For evidence of this, you can log on to imdb.com and take a look at his quietly impressive credits, or you can go see "The Door In the Floor," one of the top performances in a career marked by graceful, subtle and largely neglected work. I will not say that "Door/Floor" is a standout performance for Bridges because it is not his way to stand out. This may be why he has never crossed the bridge from acting to stardom. He is not an egoist, and his style is not the "look what I'm doing" contortion of stardom but the steady planing and shaving of a craftsman. Having said that, "Door/Floor" may be a role that attracts attention, because for once he brings his considerable skill to a character who seeks it. In "Floor," adapted from a section of a John Irving novel, he plays Ted Cole, a writer, artist, bohemian, nudist and louse - a sort of Gaugin of the Hamptons, painter of native women, though in this case the native women are wealthy Manhattan socialites (married or otherwise) who wish to be painted and bedded by the island bad boy. That Cole himself is married is not an impediment to his activity. There are comical aspects to this - as when Cole hires a preppy apprentice (Jon Foster) to drive him to his "sessions," first pausing to consider whether the "painting" will take 10 minutes or several hours. "Door" strikes an unusual balance between humor and sadness, the latter explored through Cole's wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), who is locked in deep depression. We learn that the divide between Cole and his wife does not arise (entirely) from adultery; rather, the adultery arises from the divide, itself rooted in an unspeakable family tragedy. In emotional terms, Cole has managed to survive the tragedy, but Marion has not - she's grown estranged not only from her husband but from her 4-year-old daughter. There are many shots of the lovely Basinger draped over an Adirondack chair, looking with haunted emptiness into the choppy sea, an east wind tousling her blond hair - you can see why any teenage boy would fall in love with her, and for Cole's new assistant, the infatuation is instantaneous. His clumsily concealed crush at first charms Marion, then awakens her, and the two begin a recklessly open affair It's a tricky business - finding a way to treat Ted's roguishness and the mist-on-marsh mournfulness that defines Marion's half of the film. Straddling the gap between the two is Bridges, who finds myriad ways to link everything, and to make the movie whole. I don't know if Bridges' great work will be noticed, because much of the attention surrounding the movie will focus on Basinger's extensive nude scenes and the sexually frank depictions of her encounters with her teenage lover, made even more risque by the perverse, Oedipal context of their relationship. But the real glue to the movie's conflicting moods is Bridges, the rare actor who can see the work as a whole, and understand how his choices affect the tone and meaning of the movie. I hope that Bridges will be remembered at Oscar time, but he probably won't be, and that will be further proof that he has given another typically first-rate Jeff Bridges performance.
	16  luglio: Un po' di news! Partial Irving book makes for a full cinematic experience  By Christy LemireTHE FIRST 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A Widow for One Year" provide the basis for "The Door in the Floor.", Associated Press  The result is a film that couldn't be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy. The film opened Wednesday.  Like the best adaptations of Irving's books -- especially "The World According to Garp" -- "The Door in the Floor" captures the author's method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material -- for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day -- but he kept Irving's spirit and much of his language intact.  This has a sort of "Summer of'42" feel to it, with the faded pastels and pale light of its Hamptons beach setting, and its relationship between teenager Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) and older, married Marion Cole (Kim Basinger), with whom he spends a summer.  "The Door in the Floor" is filled with anguish, accurately conveying the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting ways.  Marion is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted (Jeff Bridges), a children's book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, N.Y., in hopes of starting over and moving on.  Ted's method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he's telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily -- effectively abandoning her when she needs him most.  As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he's lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer Eddie, a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas' teacher, for the summer.  Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness who doesn't quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he's so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.)  We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted's schlep work, but to service Marion's needs as well. He becomes the sons she's lost and the lover she's pushed away, and we don't know until the very end whether this was Ted's intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events.  That Ted is aware his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie's many surprising quirks.  Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father's absence -- Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of "I Am Sam" -- and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly.  Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn't as clear-cut as he originally thought. But he never loses his innate sweetness.  He has some graphic -- although realistically awkward -- sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since "L.A. Confidential," which earned her an Oscar.  Some will gripe that she's not really acting, but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film's emotion, are evidence that less really can be more.  "Depression in the Floor" by C.A. Wolski  Boasting a stellar cast, a crisp, literate script and solid direction, The Door in the Floor is one of those rarities of the summer -- a serious picture for the over 35 crowd. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most depressing movies of the year filled with beautiful people who spend two hours being noble and stoic and, yes, beautiful, in the face of a lingering tragedy. Based on the John Irving novel A Widow for One Year, The Door in the Floor chronicles the last gasp of the marriage of children's author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and his wife Marion (Kim Basinger). The couple has decided on a trial separation for the summer spending alternate nights at the family Hampton's home caring for their 4-year-old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning). While the movie is about the disintegration and rebirth of the Cole family, it is also a ghost story. Ted, Marion and Ruth are haunted by the memory of the couple's oldest children, Timothy and Thomas, who died in a freak accident some years before. While the Coles are working to salvage what's left of their marriage, Ted arranges for a summer intern Eddie O'Hare (John Foster), a 17-year-old student from his dead sons' alma mater Exeter, to come and see what the life of a writer is all about.  Eddie's primary duties include ferrying Ted to his daily trysts with his mistress (Mimi Rogers) and continuously retyping the same children's story over and over. During his downtime, Eddie develops a friendship with Marion, which quickly turns into a sexual relationship. The plot of The Door in the Floor is predictable and surprising at the same time. Every event that occurs has a sense of tragic inevitability, reflecting Ted's theory of plotting his dark children's stories. But there is moments of whimsy, joy and even downright comedy. Ted's "break up" with his mistress is played with comic effect, and Rogers chews the scenery with abandon. The plot, though, is little more than window dressing for Basinger, Bridges and newcomer Foster's performances. Basinger, in particular, turns in her best work in ages, her fading beauty in stark counterpoint to the sorrow her Marion displays in almost every scene -- including the rather explicit and purposely empty sex scenes with Foster. Foster is slightly less effective, but he does play his lovestruck teenager with the right sense of gravity and seriousness. Bridges has the most difficult role in the movie. He has to balance between the darkness of a grieving parent and boozy excess of a successful, celebrity writer.  All in all, writer-director Tod Williams delivers a standout piece of work except for one glaring omission, which could be a flaw in the source material as well. There is nothing redemptive in The Door in the Floor. We are presented with the story of these three noble, sad people's lives and in the end all we have is the end. There is little to take away from the suffering that has gone before other than the promise that life will go on somehow for these damaged, sad, albeit noble people. Except for that one fatal flaw which permeates the entire picture, Williams could have delivered a knockout. Instead he has given us a picture worthwhile only for its parts, but worthwhile all the same.  Grade: B  Kim Basinger: «Io, prigioniera di un’immagine glamour» LOS ANGELES - La leggenda di Hollywood innamorata delle bionde è vera? «Lo è ed è un forte condizionamento - dice Kim Basinger - Lo è stato per la mia generazione, per quella precedente e lo è più che mai per le giovani attrici anche se poi, spesso, le bionde conquistano Oscar imbruttendosi, come Charlize Theron, con protesi e parrucche». Cinquantenne (dal dicembre scorso), fascino immutato, la bionda Kim è impegnata a Hollywood nel lancio del film The door in the floor di Tod Williams, che la riporterà sugli schermi in coppia con Jeff Bridges, ma anche sul set di altre due pellicole, Cellular ed Elvis has left the building. Dopo l’Oscar per L.A.Confidential, dopo un duro e litigioso divorzio da Alec Baldwin e l’apparizione con Eminem in 8 Mile , è di nuovo molto richiesta. E non ha tagliato le chiome di 9 settimane e 1/2. Nel film, secondo una moda hollywoodiana alla Demi Moore, Mira Sorvino e Sharon Stone, lei, donna matura, vive un legame con un ragazzo che potrebbe esserle figlio... «L’attrazione nasce da un dolore profondo, non dalla rivalsa di tante donne di oggi decise a restare giovani. Nella storia i miei figli muoiono in un incidente, io cado in una depressione profonda: cerco la giovinezza di mio figlio in questo legame».  Come altre attrici anche lei ha vissuto la prigionia della bionda glamour?  «La vivo ancora perché l’immagine che il cinema mi ha regalato ha condizionato anche la mia personalità. Essere bionde glamour può diventare un limite anche nei ruoli. L’immagine di donna bionda guida le scelte estetiche di tante ragazzine: cerco di controllare la cosa con mia figlia Ireland, che ha dieci anni, ma come modelli ha le cantanti di oggi, tutte bionde anche loro».  Il cinema continua a rilanciare le bionde mentre per gli attori il discorso è diverso...  «Ma quando esce Troy con Brad Pitt, le ragazzine e le signore fanno la fila, come facevamo noi per Redford. Non mi dispiace affatto avere 50 anni e penso che il cinema mi darà ruoli anche quando i capelli saranno bianchi e potrò essere me stessa sino in fondo. Il privilegio di diventare vecchi, significa che non si è morti giovani. Forse riuscirò a rifiutare la dorata prigione di un’immagine, che per Hollywood resta quella della Monroe».  A Gift to Grief  Jeff Bridges is at his swaggering best in a film about a couple wrecked by loss.  BY MELISSA LEVINE The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. She is soon joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through the photos, helping her to recount them, to tell their stories. Nearly every photograph shows two boys, brothers, as blond as the girl. "Dead means they're broken?" she asks.  The scene is both self-consciously explanatory and overly freighted. We are told too directly what is happening, and what has already happened, and what is happening means too much. We have just met these characters; we can't yet trust them to hold what the scene asks them to hold.  Before long, however, things get considerably better. The girl's father, a writer played by Jeff Bridges, reveals himself to be raucous, profligate, and debauched. Her grief-stricken mother, played by Kim Basinger, has largely turned to stone. And then a high school student arrives to serve as Mr. Cole's assistant for the summer. His name is Eddie (Jon Foster), and he has long been a devoted fan of his employer; within moments of seeing his employer's wife, Eddie is smitten with her, too. Now we're cooking.  The Door in the Floor, adapted by writer and director Tod Williams from the first part of John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year, is not unfamiliar. It has the icy chill of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm; the haunted, atmospheric grief of Todd Field's In the Bedroom; and the quirky-WASP abandon of Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys. It also basks in its share of Irving eccentricity, complete with a character whose outsize personality is so extravagant that it nearly balances the utter vacancy that characterizes his wife. Ted Cole is the kind of man whose grief manifests in alcoholism, sex, and spooky drawings of naked women. Marion Cole, on the other hand, has been sucked clean into the void. When asked about "the accident" (the unexplained event that killed her two sons), she disappears behind her eyes like a corpse.  Except when she's with Eddie. The boy stirs something in her, and she responds to his affections -- but not because she desires him. Instead, she feels compassion for his desire; she wants to give him what she isn't sure her teenaged sons received before they died. (In one scene, as they make love in a beautiful room bright with afternoon light, Marion's face is a train wreck of damage and loss.) For her, Eddie is far more than a sweet boy whose innocence is on its way out the window. He is, first, a surrogate son, and later a husband: It's no accident that "Ted" and "Eddie" are essentially the same name, both nicknames for Edward. For Marion, this feast of the flesh is an extended goodbye to all of the men in her life, a gift to herself and her grief.  Marion Cole is not, suffice it to say, an easy role. Basinger takes a stab at it, and she does all right, after bombing her opening scene. But the part might have gone to someone with a little more gravitas. Also strange is Elle Fanning, playing Rose, the couple's young daughter. This, too, is a spooky role, especially for such a young child: Rose is haunted by the brothers she never had, whose death her birth was meant to assuage, and she lives among the ruins, with one parent imploding and the other sloshing around in the muck. Fanning has perfected a kind of shifty-eyed perdition, a not quite definable less-than-okayness that's unsettling. But there are times when her shtick (if a four-year-old can be said to have such a thing) falls flat.  On the other hand, Jeff Bridges is fabulous. His swaggering, half-assed, passive-aggressive Ted is both charming and despicable. Just when we think him worthy of nothing but condemnation, Bridges shows us something redeeming and real. Jon Foster's Eddie is also a marvel, especially across from Basinger's Marion, who is lifeless by design. Eddie is the film's most accessible character, the one with whom the audience is meant to align, and Foster's portrayal is robust -- first deferential and halting, awed; later sobered and even soured. The arc is beautifully described.  Writer and director Williams has done an excellent job in both of his roles. Save for a couple of false notes, the script is dead on, offering clever parallels (especially with writing and texts) and several delicious payoffs; it's immensely satisfying to reach the end of a movie and witness the blossoming of everything that was planted earlier, whether we'd remembered it or not. Yes, the title (taken from a children's book written by Ted) is a mistake; it suits a story for children but not a serious adult drama that would do best not to overplay its guiding metaphor. That said, the image is handled well throughout the film, evoked precisely when we need to be reminded that someone, or more than someone, has disappeared down a hole.  Ultimately, The Door in the Floor is a surprisingly good film, not quite original but smart, careful, and steadfast in its dedication to its characters. It's compassionately committed to exploring the lives of people who are sorely wrecked; it gives them the space to be irresponsible and bad. And through the eyes of its young interloper, it reminds us what it's like to grow up.  'Door in the Floor' not open-and-shut success By CHRIS HEWITT Knight Ridder Newspapers  It's an irony worthy of novelist John Irving: The Door in the Floor, based on his novel A Widow for One Year, is both the most faithful adaptation of his work so far and the best argument that the movies should stop trying.  Irving has not been served well by the movies, even the stodgy Cider House Rules. His rambunctious, decades-spanning books find their most felicitous form in the novel, which allows them to sprawl all over the place, immersing us in the lives of his evolving characters so we feel we understand them.  There are exceptions, of course, such as Lawrence of Arabia, but the movies are better at grace notes and they cannot encompass the rowdy scope of Irving's work. Two hours just aren't enough.  In The Door in the Floor, writer and director Tod Williams has the seemingly smart idea to adapt only the first third of A Widow for One Year, and he does a fine In the Bedroom-like job of recording the details of a precarious moment in the lives of four people. Ted (Jeff Bridges) and Marion (Kim Basinger) are ripping their marriage apart as they mourn the deaths of their two sons. Their daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, sister of Dakota), feels she doesn't fit in the family. When Ted hires Eddie (Jon Foster), a teenage assistant, all three latch onto him in unhealthy ways.  Eddie (Jon Foster) and Marion (Kim Basinger) finds reasons to be alone, in The Door in the Floor.  As tenderly acted as this movie is, it never finds its tone or purpose. Scenes of Ted on a self-destructive fling are meant to be tragicomic but come across as pathetic and vicious. Marion's affair with Eddie is meant to be poignant but verges on laugh-out-loud ridiculous.  And we can't tell who the focus is. Although Fanning has by far the smallest role, there is a sense that everything revolves around the future of her hopeful, poignant character. But the movie, which seems determined to use its bigger stars as much as possible, does not pick up on that.  There's a reason for that, of course, and a reason the film seems like a beginning with no middle or end. I know I'm harping on the book, but it helps to go back to it as you're trying to figure out what goes wrong with the movie. In the first third of A Widow for One Year, we're also confused about who to focus on, but the rest of the novel reveals that Ruth is the main character and that the first section of the book gave us vital information about her.  In the movie, we get that info but, unless we follow up by reading the book, we have nothing to do with it.  Grade: C  Movie Review (B+)  By PHILIP WUNTCH / The Dallas Morning News  Each decade has its own selection of underappreciated actors, but all of them dwell in the shadow of Jeff Bridges.  Well into his fourth decade of underappreciation, he is absolutely riveting in The Door in the Floor, giving a performance that should be remembered on Oscar ballots.  Based on a section of John Irving's A Widow for One Year, the film is directed and acted with intelligence and resonance. Mr. Bridges plays Ted Cole, a vain, self-absorbed author of children's books. Kim Basinger plays his estranged wife, Marion, and newcomer Jon Foster plays 16-year-old Eddie, who works as Ted's assistant during the summer and begins a passionate affair with Marion.  We learn the tragic event that sealed Ted's and Marion's estrangement; yet, the film's emotions are restrained, and it never detours into convenient melodramatics.  Mr. Bridges embraces his character's weaknesses, as well as the strengths that slowly come into view. It's a superb performance by an actor whose recognition is long overdue.  At the Movies: 'The Door in the Floor'  By CHRISTY LEMIRE, AP Entertainment Writer  The first 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A Widow for One Year" provide the basis for "The Door in the Floor."  The result is a film that couldn't be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy.  Like the best adaptations of Irving's books — especially "The World According to Garp" — "The Door in the Floor" really captures the author's method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material — for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day — but he kept Irving's spirit and much of his language intact.  Williams' first film was another coming-of-age story, 1999's "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole." This has a sort of "Summer of '42" feel to it, with the faded pastels and pale light of its Hamptons beach setting, and its relationship between teenager Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) and the older, married Marion Cole (Kim Basinger (news)) with whom he spends a summer.  "The Door in the Floor" also will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a more recent film, "In the Bedroom" from 2001. Both are anguished, excellent, and both accurately convey the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting, ways.  Marion is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges (news)), a children's book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, N.Y., in hopes of starting over and moving on.  Ted's method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he's telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily — effectively abandoning her when she needs him most.  As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he's lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer Eddie, a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas' teacher, for the summer.  Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness when he arrives and doesn't quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he's so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.)  We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted's schlep work, but to service Marion's needs, as well. He becomes the sons she's lost and the lover she's pushed away, and we don't know until the very end whether this was Ted's intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events.  That Ted is aware that his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie's many surprising quirks.  Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father's absence — Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of "I Am Sam" — and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly.  Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn't as clear-cut as he originally thought. Throughout the process, though, he never loses his innate sweetness.  He has some graphic — though realistically awkward — sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since "L.A. Confidential," which earned her an Oscar. Some will gripe that she's not really "acting," but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film's emotion, are evidence that less really can be more.  "The Door in the Floor, a Focus Features release, is rated R for strong sexuality and graphic images, and language. Running time: 111 minutes. Four stars out of four. Bridges', Basinger's 'Door'  Rated R for language, strong sexuality and graphic images  Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes  Written and directed by Tod Williams  By JEFFREY WESTHOFF  "The Door in the Floor" is a film about child abuse.  The filmmakers either don't realize this or don't have the courage to admit it. But any feeling person who watches "Door in the Floor" won't care about the miseries the main characters bring upon themselves, but about the mental anguish they are causing the 4-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) unfortunate enough to orbit their perverse lives of self-loathing.  Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger play a couple whose marriage has foundered since the death of their college-age sons. Hoping to ease the pain, they had another child, Ruth, now 4. But Ruth failed to cheer them up, so she wanders the house looking at the many photos of the brothers she never knew and makes such morose statements as "Mommy's sadder" and "Tell me what dead is."  Marion Cole (Basinger) has become all but comatose with grief. Ted Cole (Bridges) is a famous children's author who has lost his inspiration. Now he spends most of his time seducing the women of their small New England island after asking to sketch them.  Summer nears, and as it often does in such portentous stories, summer is a season of life-altering events. These events begin when Ted hires a recent high school graduate, Eddie O'Hare, as his driver (Ted lost his license after numerous DUIs). Eddie arrives shortly after Ted and Marion have agreed to live in separate houses.  Eddie has always idolized Ted, and he is shattered to find the author of the classic children's tale "The Door in the Floor" is a drunken philanderer.  He sympathizes with Marion. Soon those feelings are stronger than sympathy, and Marion is enough of an emotional wreck to take advantage of the boy and the love he wants to give.  If you haven't figured it out by now, "The Door on the Floor" is based on a John Irving novel, "A Widow for One Year." Tod Williams directs the film from his own adaptation of Irving's novel, again proving that Irving's themes fail to translate into film.  But just so we know the movie is literary, the art comments on itself when Ted says, "Everything in fiction is a tool. Even death. These are like different colors on an artist's palette."  And just in case we don't understand one of the title's meanings, a helpful grad student shows up to analyze Ted's work (and, hence, how filmgoers should interpret it).  "The Door in the Floor" is filled with symbols and symbols of symbols within symbols. Because of this we are supposed to find poignancy in Marion's seduction of a 17-year-old boy. When she says Eddie reminds her of her dead sons, she adds metaphoric incest and necrophilia to her literal statutory rape. I doubt anyone would find it poignant if Ted were seducing a 17-year-old girl.  No one pays much attention to little Ruth as she witnesses all this sexual trauma. And she can't help but witness it because Dad walks around nude and Mom leaves her bedroom door open when she and Eddie try something especially kinky.  We are supposed to care as Eddie becomes a man, as Ted realizes he is acting like a boy and as Marion realizes she has deep issues. But these are adults who don't feel accountable for their actions. The tragic figure here is Ruth. She's too young to realize it. The adults in her life – and that includes the filmmakers – should realize it, but they have abandoned her.  Movie Reviews Movie Reviews Archives  The Door in the Floor  By janet smith  Kim Basinger and Jon Foster star in Tod Williams' The Door in the Floor.  Starring Jeff Bridges, Jon Foster, and Kim Basinger. Rated 18A.  Nobody does grizzled eccentricity like Jeff Bridges, and in The Door in the Floor he really seizes the opportunity to fly his inner freak flag. Ted Cole is a serial philanderer who sketches the neighbourhood women spread-eagled on his couch, showers naked in his yard when not going commando in a caftan and floppy straw hat, and has a thing for crude rap songs and Girls Gone Wild videos. Bridges manages to pull off a pervy failed novelist­cum­children's writer, making him as detestable as he is likable.  A little disappointingly, the other actors and elements of Door don't always capture the same twisted genius so necessary in adapting a John Irving novel. Writer-director Tod Williams cleverly narrows his focus, Tin Drum­like, to the tight first section of the sprawling, multigenerational A Widow for One Year. In interpreting that story of a young writing student who arrives for a summer apprenticeship with Cole in his riotously dysfunctional household, he doesn't succumb to the treacle as did Mark Steven Johnson in 1998's Simon Birch (the screen rendition of A Prayer for Owen Meany); he's too fearless about the bawdier, darker elements of the script. But there is a nagging sense of blandification­--the same slightly glossed-over feeling you got watching The Cider House Rules. Door just needs a little more World According to Garp warpedness and a little less of Kim Basinger's bereaved mom staring out sadly at the sea.  Her Marion Cole is separating from Ted after years of struggling to deal with the deaths of two teen sons. But they're sharing custody of Ruthie (Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sis), a toddler with a rather contrived penchant for ritualistically reviewing framed photos of her dead siblings and recounting the stories behind each one. When student Eddie (Jon Foster) arrives at their seaside East Hampton estate, he becomes a glorified driver and typist for his wayward mentor. He's obsessed with Marion and suddenly finds her willingly offering hands-on sexual tutorials--a reckless proposition in a house apparently bereft of door locks. He's also increasingly fixated on finding out the details of the tragedy that started the family's trouble in the first place.  The Summer of '42­style affair is left underexplored--psychologically, if not physically. The gawky, virginal teen never seems as awestruck or confused as he should be. Basinger, though suitably fetishized under Terry Stacey's lens, is too zombielike to tap the depths of a tortured woman who's essentially fucking out her grief, with some disturbing oedipal overtones. Compare her performance to that of the gutsier Mimi Rogers, who bares it all, literally and figuratively, as Cole's latest object of exploitation.  The script, which smartly relies on Irving's own spare words, is simply evocative, and when everything jells it pulls off Irving's strange mix of the grotesque, the blackly funny, and the haunting. Tellingly, Bridges is always at the centre of the best scenes: a hilarious episode when one of Ted's crotch sketches blows onto a windshield, say, or the chilling moment when he's reading a children's story about a portal in the floor where babies disappear. But it's the final image, an enigmatic realization of the title, that nails Irving's unique brand of tweaked reality. If the entire movie had been treated this way, it could have opened the door to it being a mad masterpiece instead of mildly lunatic entertainment.  The Hipster in the Floor 'Door in the Floor' director Tod Williams talks coolness and style Look around the art house scene, and you'll see them.  Young, pretentious, high-minded directors; dressing in expensive blazers and dating gorgeous actresses, winning praise from critics while confusing audiences with talky, angsty, and usually boring films that go nowhere for two hours. Those who have seen writer-director Tod Williams' 1998 debut "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" might put the 35-year-old Williams in that same talented, though often detestable, camp. Williams even has the dress code down; when we meet high above the Chicago skyline in early June, the messy-haired Williams is wearing a ratty sweater with a hole near the collarbone, revealing a red undershirt which, conveniently, matches his red socks. This is, of course, the hipster's paradox: is this hole the result of years of wear and tear, or rather an opportune "accident?" As soon as I saw Williams, I doubted his appearance. This guy was married to Famke Janssen for five years. There's no excuse for him to have a hole in his sweater. I'd seen a thousand Tod Williams' at record stores. But I never figured someone who looked like this could make as compelling and mature a film as Williams has with his second feature, "The Door in the Floor." Based on part of John Irving's bestseller "A Widow for One Year," Williams draws his film from the novel's opening section, which concerns successful children's author Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) and his troubled relationship with his wife Marion (Kim Basinger) as they both struggle over the death of their two sons years before.  As Williams himself describes the film, "It's a loss of innocence, but it's not so much the sickly sweet loss of innocence, it's also the fact that maybe as we get older we become basically assholes to one another, if we're not careful." When Williams approached Irving in 2000 about the film, the novelist, somewhat infamous for his indifference to the cinema (who can blame him, after the uneven adaptations of "The World According to Garp" and "Hotel New Hampshire," as well as the disaster that was "Simon Birch,") gave Williams the rights to the novel for free. This unique relationship with Irving is part of what makes Williams one of the most "literary" filmmakers around. "Sebastian Cole" may have seemed like a typical teen-oriented indie dramedy, but through the lens of "The Door in the Floor," it is a logical precursor to the uneasy restraint and natural drama Williams elicits in his latest film. "I think that my primary interest in film is still content. ... Considerations of style are totally secondary," Williams calmly says.  "The movie is very classical in style," Williams stresses, showing a level of enthusiasm he has otherwise held back in our interview. "Everything is lush and composed, and I tried to make it feel as much like a classic, elegant movie, and within that is a nasty, unresolved, complicated human mess." I'm willing to forgo Williams' claim that his film is "lush" and "composed" -- mainly because he's right. When discussing another formal element of his film -- the terrific score, by Marcelo Zarvos -- Williams again articulates his filmmaking philosophy. "I wanted (the music) to be emotional without being manipulative. ... So many movies are overly manipulative, and I believe in what Ted Cole is telling Eddie when he says you need to prepare an audience for something." Towards the end of our interview, Williams and I talk about the Ted Cole character, terrifically portrayed by Bridges. Williams defends Cole's lack of creativity by noting, "He has the permascruff." Williams rubs his own unshaven face. "That's always the sign of a true fraud. It conveys casual, like if I had this exact level of scruff always," again, brushing his cheeks, "it conveys casual, but it requires maintenance." Suddenly, I admired that hole in Williams' sweater. It may convey casualness, but this is no phony hipster. This is a storyteller, and just as I've decided his own permascruff is earned, so is that convenient hole. Now I just want to know the story behind it. 'Door in the Floor' open to well-conceived ideas By: DAN BENNETT - Staff Writer  Making films from John Irving's novels has not been easy for Hollywood, though the early success story "The World According to Garp" and more recently "The Cider House Rules" proved that creative minds could give it a go. Those minds included Irving's, who won an Oscar for the adaptation of the latter film. Add to the short list "The Door in the Floor," based on the first third of Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year." The adaptation, which enjoyed Irving's involvement, is crisp, riveting and emotionally compelling, with dynamic and daring performances, also strong in conveying Irving's powerful use of irony, his signature storytelling device.  In "The Door in the Floor," Jeff Bridges plays Ted Cole, a successful writer and illustrator of children's books living in the Hamptons with his, wife Marion, played by Kim Basinger, and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning). Things are not well on their beautiful seaside compound. The couple are attempting to deal with the accidental death of their two teenage sons a few years earlier, but healing is an abstract notion. Instead, the Ted and Marion have grown apart. Marion is mostly silent, and tries but often fails to give Ruth the attention she needs. Ted gives Ruth that attention, his love and affection, but his focus is out of whack. Ted's time is spent using his considerable charisma to seduce women, but his outwardly jovial personality masks a hollow inside. Ted hires college student Eddie (Jon Foster) as his assistant for the summer, but Ted's intentions are unclear. Does Ted want Eddie as an in-house healing presence, a reminder of Marion's lost sons, as a method to help her recover? Or does he secretly understand what is about to happen, that Eddie and the grieving Marion will begin an affair, rekindling in her some spark of life? "A Door in the Floor" explores the emotionally tumultuous summer of these characters. The decisions each eventually makes are not totally expected, not always heroic, but human. We see how their choices make sense for them, that each finds tools for self-survival. The film uses tragedy and humor to make its points, that famous Irving one-two combo, and writer-director Tod Williams mixes both elements with skill, introducing the story and the characters slowly, unveiling new truths when appropriate. Bridges, in the featured role, is superb as the wayward Ted, mostly good-hearted, but as selfish as he is well-meaning. Bridges makes Ted both likable and flawed, and we can sense Ted's despair as he grapples with the loss of his family and his marriage, and wrestles with his immaturity as he also summons reserves of strength to love and protect his daughter. It is an award-caliber performance. Likewise, Basinger, with a character coming from a different place, emotes through little more than looks and expression ---- or lack thereof ---- yet also conveys a world of feeling. It's another showing of her growth into a courageous, formidable actor. "The Door in the Floor" is likely to please Irving fans, understandably wary, also please moviegoers who value deft storytelling, good acting and creative invention. Don't read too much into this family BY JOHN ANDERSON STAFF WRITER (R). " Grief is the uncredited character in this black-edged comedy about a philandering husband, mourning wife, displaced daughter and their summer boy. If you haven't read the book, don't. With Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers. Screenplay by Tod Williams, from the novel "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving. Directed by Tod Williams. 1:51 (sex, nudity, profanity). At area theaters. The perils of reading a novel before seeing the movie couldn't be made much clearer than by "The Door in the Floor." To read or not to read - it isn't even a question. If you haven't looked at John Irving's "A Widow for One Year" and plan to see Tod Williams' film, avoid the book: It's hard to say that what remains from the novel still makes sense, only that what's been changed has made the story simpler, shallower and far more cookie- cutter. Spare yourself the disappointment, maybe even aggravation: The transformation of what Irving wrote to what Williams filmed is a classic case of diminishment by movie convention. "Door in the Floor" is based on only about the first third of Irving's book, and the characters are the same: Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is a successful children's writer. His wife, Marion (Kim Basinger), is a beauty whose loss of two sons (the circumstances of which unfurl with portentous control) haunts her - as it does Ruth (Elle Fanning), their 4-year-old who, because Mom is preoccupied by the subject, gets to ask such precocious questions as "Tell me what death is" while studying the photographs set up as a shrine to Tom and Tim, the brothers no longer there. Into this unhappy Hamptons milieu drops summer employee Eddie (Jon Foster), a shy 17-year-old with a prep school connection to Ted, which is one point at which the film goes awry: As written, Ted could have been played by Alan Alda or James Rebhorn, men who could have given the compulsively satyrish Ted the self-loathing he needs. Not Bridges: He does Ted as bona-fide bohemian, no more a Connecticut prep school alum than was Paul Gauguin (whose hat collection he seems to have inherited). Ted's idea of an adulterous repast is a bottle of wine, two glasses and an entire wheel of Stilton. No wonder he's wearing caftans by the end of the film. Marion's really the problem, though. As portrayed by Basinger, she's far more fragile and maternal than Irving's angry mother, who harbored a cosmic grudge against God for taking her sons and toward Ted for not stopping him. Marion should be a woman whose sexuality is undampened despite her grief, and who simply overwhelms a boy like Eddie. Certainly, Basinger is a good candidate for adolescent lust object, but she's so washed out and wounded that the May-September bed romp simply doesn't make much emotional sense. Bridges' Ted is fun to watch, all self-destruction and middle- aged delinquency. The young Elle Fanning is adorable but no actress and Mimi Rogers, playing a particularly angry ex-lover of Ted's, does a very courageous nude scene but seems to have been given no sense of the role by her director. Williams has this problem with most of the cast, including Foster, who seems to be in the story simply because Eddie was in the book. Too bad his fealty wasn't taken a bit further.  Oscar, don't you dare forget about these By ROBERT W. BUTLER The Kansas City Star Hollywood has a short memory. You're only as good as your last movie, and if you want to be remembered at Oscar time, make sure your film comes out after Labor Day. Which means that just about everything that has been released so far in 2004 hasn't much of a chance when the Academy Award nominations are announced next January. But despite the Tinseltown tradition of saving the best movies and performances for the big end-of-year nomination derby, the last six months have seen some Oscar-worthy work. So here, before we all forget them, are my January-July nominees: • “Spider-Man 2” deserves at least four nominations. First for Tobey Maguire, whose nerd-as-superhero performance is simultaneously funny, touching and, well, heroic. Then the special effects guys. Yeah, some of the web-swinging stuff still looks too computer animated, but Doc Ock's metal tentacles were awesome. The screenplay is terrific, a winning blend of big adventure and genuinely human moments. It is credited to veteran Alvin Sargent, although Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Michael Chabon pitched in. And, finally, director Sam Raimi for putting it all together so well. • Ron Perlman made “Hellboy,” playing the title character as a bad-tempered, crimson-skinned, cigar-chomping demon committed to protecting humanity but ambivalent about his chances of ever being accepted by our kind. It's impossible to imagine the movie working without him — he deserves some sort of statuette simply for acting through all that makeup. • “The Alamo” lasted in theaters barely longer than the 13-day siege it depicted. Yet those who caught Billy Bob Thornton's performance as the legendary David Crockett saw greatness at work. This was a Davy Crockett you could believe, a guy who wasn't all that thrilled with dying for a cause. • Sword-and-sandal movies have traditionally been a haven for bad acting. Yet “Troy” produced Oscar-worthy performances from Eric Bana as the warrior Hector and Peter O'Toole as his grieving father, Priam. Both would be competing in the supporting actor category. • Kevin Kline gives a tour-de-force performance as songwriting genius Cole Porter in “De-Lovely” (opening today). If Porter's essence remains elusive, Kline perfectly nails the public man. • The thriller “The Clearing” is most effective as an actor's showcase. Of the three principals, I'd nominate Willem Dafoe's kidnapper (he has played plenty of creeps, but this one you actually feel for) and Helen Mirren as a well-to-do wife who discovers that her husband (Robert Redford) has a closet full of secrets. • Richard Linklater's romance “Before Sunset” is the only film I've seen so far this year that I'd absolutely nominate for best picture. It also deserves a nod for best actor and actress (Ethan Hawke and the divine Julie Delpy), best director (Linklater) and screenplay (credited to Linklater, Kim Krizan, Hawke and Delpy). • Best documentary? So far this year we've seen “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Super Size Me” and “The Control Room.” And if you're going to get violent when discussing this category, take it outside. • The biggest hit of the year's first six months was “The Passion of the Christ.” And whether you loved it or not, there's not much question that Mel Gibson deserves a directing nomination for single-handedly shepherding this project to completion. And while we're at it I'd nominate Hristo Shopov for a supporting actor Oscar for his performance as Pilate. • Those who nominate in the production design category have plenty of possibilities to choose from, thanks to this year's emphasis on fantasy: “Troy,” the latest “Harry Potter,” “The Chronicles of Riddick” and “I, Robot.” And let's not forget the exemplary art direction on display in “The Alamo” and “The Passion …” • Finally, there's “The Door in the Floor,” which doesn't open until next week but which features at least two spectacular performances. First there's Jeff Bridges. Imagine Pablo Picasso as a writer of children's books and you'll get an idea of the bombastic, pompous, macho-oozing, manipulative celebrity Bridges portrays. Then there's Kim Basinger, who plays his grief-stricken wife who, having lost her teenage sons in a car accident, now turns her erotic attentions to a prep school kid who's doing an internship with her husband. Basinger delivers a one-note performance, true. But it's exactly the right note. 'The Door in the Floor' worth opening Film a complete, richly developed adaptation of Irving novel The result is a film that couldn’t be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy. Like the best adaptations of Irving’s books — especially “The World According to Garp” — “The Door in the Floor” really captures the author’s method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material — for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day — but he kept Irving’s spirit and much of his language intact. Williams’ first film was another coming-of-age story, 1999’s “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole.” This has a sort of “Summer of ’42” feel to it, with the faded pastels and pale light of its Hamptons beach setting, and its relationship between teenager Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster) and the older, married Marion Cole (Kim Basinger) with whom he spends a summer. “The Door in the Floor” also will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a more recent film, “In the Bedroom” from 2001. Both are anguished, excellent, and both accurately convey the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting, ways. Marion is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a children’s book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota’s younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, N.Y., in hopes of starting over and moving on. Ted’s method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he’s telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily — effectively abandoning her when she needs him most. As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he’s lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer Eddie, a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas’ teacher, for the summer. Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness when he arrives and doesn’t quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he’s so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.) We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted’s schlep work, but to service Marion’s needs, as well. He becomes the sons she’s lost and the lover she’s pushed away, and we don’t know until the very end whether this was Ted’s intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events. That Ted is aware that his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie’s many surprising quirks. Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father’s absence — Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of “I Am Sam” — and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly. Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn’t as clear-cut as he originally thought. Throughout the process, though, he never loses his innate sweetness. He has some graphic — though realistically awkward — sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since “L.A. Confidential,” which earned her an Oscar. Some will gripe that she’s not really “acting,” but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film’s emotion, are evidence that less really can be more. The first 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A... The first 183 pages of John Irving's 576-page best seller "A Widow for One Year" provide the basis for "The Door in the Floor." The result is a film that couldn't be more complete, with rich, complex characters, darkly comic moments and a palpable feeling of melancholy. Like the best adaptations of Irving's books - especially "The World According to Garp" - "The Door in the Floor" really captures the author's method of juxtaposing the tragic with the perversely humorous. Writer-director Tod Williams made a few tweaks to the source material - for one, he moved the time frame from the late 1950s to the present day - but he kept Irving's spirit and much of his language intact. Williams' first film was another coming-of-age story, 1999's "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole." This has a sort of "Summer of '42" feel to it, with the faded pastels and pale light of its Hamptons beach setting, and its relationship between teenager Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster) and the older, married Marion Cole (Kim Basinger) with whom he spends a summer. "The Door in the Floor" also will undoubtedly draw comparisons to a more recent film, "In the Bedroom" from 2001. Both are anguished, excellent, and both accurately convey the fact that people deal with loss in differing, sometimes conflicting, ways. Marion is practically catatonic after the deaths of her teenage sons, Timothy and Thomas. Her husband, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges), a children's book author and illustrator, has moved Marion and their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), to pastoral East Hampton, N.Y., in hopes of starting over and moving on. Ted's method of doing that involves alcohol and afternoon trysts, and when we first see him and Marion together, he's telling her that he thinks they should separate temporarily - effectively abandoning her when she needs him most. As for Ted, he needs an assistant (actually, he needs a driver because he's lost his license) so he hires aspiring writer Eddie, a student at Exeter Academy whose father was Timothy and Thomas' teacher, for the summer. Eddie is a tightly wound bundle of eagerness when he arrives and doesn't quite know how to handle Ted, one of his literary idols, who strips down and showers in front of Eddie within minutes of their introduction. (Bridges is a fantastic casting choice, by the way, because he's so adept at playing the breezy, slightly unpredictable cad.) We come to realize that Eddie is there not just to do Ted's schlep work, but to service Marion's needs, as well. He becomes the sons she's lost and the lover she's pushed away, and we don't know until the very end whether this was Ted's intention for him all along or just a serendipitous confluence of events. That Ted is aware that his young assistant has become intimate with his wife, and cares only in a passive-aggressive, territorial way, is one of the movie's many surprising quirks. Eddie also functions as a sort of father figure to bright, young Ruth in her father's absence - Fanning has the same startling poise and maturity as her sister, the star of "I Am Sam" - and the combination of all three newfound roles causes him to grow up confidently and rather unexpectedly. Foster smoothly evolves from playing the conservative, uptight boy to a young man who realizes that doing the right thing isn't as clear-cut as he originally thought. Throughout the process, though, he never loses his innate sweetness. He has some graphic - though realistically awkward - sex scenes with Basinger, doing her best work since "L.A. Confidential," which earned her an Oscar. Some will gripe that she's not really "acting," but merely remaining beautifully stoic. Her performance, and the powerful simplicity of much of the film's emotion, are evidence that less really can be more. "The Door in the Floor, a Focus Features release, is rated R for strong sexuality and graphic images, and language. Running time: 111 minutes. Four stars out of four. The Door in the Floor: Drama. Starring Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger and Jon Foster. Directed by Tod Williams. (R. 111 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)  "The Door in the Floor" is a prurient and emotionally dead film about prurient and emotionally dead people who consider themselves wise because they're pretty sure life isn't worth living. They're certainly not worth watching. Showcasing three individuals whose spiritual and physical journeys are both repellent and mundane, the film is just a long and pointless slog.  Even Jeff Bridges can't rescue the movie, despite his excellent performance as Ted, a hard-driving, philandering author of children's books. Bridges can hold the screen and make us watch him. He can convey Ted's creative spark and let us understand that his ability to function is a direct function of his ability to ward off self-examination, through sexual liaisons and relentless drinking. He can even hint that the dark, unconscious forces that allow Ted's work to flourish would scatter like mice if the floodlight of insight were ever turned on them. But he can't make Ted into anything other than a dreadful, miserable bore.  Ted has an equally boring wife -- Marion, played by Kim Basinger -- so one would think they'd get along. But, alas, he's jolly boring, and she's depressed boring. To make matters worse, many years before, Ted and Marion's teenage sons were both killed in a horrific car accident, and ever since, Marion has been in an emotional coma. So at the start of the film, Ted and Marion agree to a trial separation.  The story's catalytic event shows up in the form of young Eddie (Jon Foster), a teenager who arrives in East Hampton, Long Island, to serve as Ted's intern. The character of Eddie combines two movie cliches. He is the sensitive, observant and diffident young man who dreams of becoming a writer. And he is the shy but lustful young man who can't stop masturbating. True to all such lustful young men in movies, if there's a room without a door or a door without a lock, that's when Eddie feels the urge.  The object of Eddie's frenzied passion is not a teenage girl, even though there is one on the premises -- a nanny (Bijou Phillips) for Ted and Marion's daughter. Rather he is inflamed by Marion, and although Basinger is indeed lovely, the spectacle of a teenage boy going crazy over a 50-year-old woman is a bit of a stretch. But call it fate: She walks in on him as he's getting carried away while looking at her underwear, and she seems to take this as neither absurd nor repellent but rather as a statement of his intentions. Within days, they're an item, going at it everywhere. And of course, they always leave the door unlocked, just in case the author wants to advance the plot by having the little daughter discover them.  The narrative staggers like a drunk about to pass out, its focus careening from one character to the next in a vain, slow-motion search for someone interesting. The attempts at profundity are insincere. The attempts at humor -- for example when Ted tries to flee from a woman (Mimi Rogers) he's used and discarded -- are tin-eared. And the fact that the movie exploits and discards Rogers as crassly as Ted treats the character she plays gives the whole film a misogynistic tinge.  Generally, there's nothing wrong with movies about creepy people. What's off-putting about this one, adapted by director Tod Williams from John Irving's novel "A Widow for One Year," is its implicit suggestion that somehow what's being depicted is a statement about the human condition, or at least is emblematic of it. The movie puts us in a world we don't want to be in and then tries to make us like it by telling us it's not a world but the world.  Of course, it's not. The panorama -- of sad and sighing adults, mock- cynical youth and precocious childhood -- is essentially empty. "The Door in the Floor" is just stylized despair pretending at philosophy.  -- Advisory: This film contains full-frontal nudity, simulated sex, sexual situations and rough language.  Bridges & Basinger in L.I. confidential  Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges play a tormented couple in 'The Door in the Floor.'  THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR With Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers. Writer-director: Tod Williams. (1:51) R: Sexuality/nudity, language.  When I read that Tod Williams was adapting "The Door in the Floor" from the first third of John Irving's rich novel "A Widow for One Year," I understood why.  That opening section, which is set over a summer in the 1950s East Hamptons, is the novel's most sensational, sexiest, most comic, most compact and most entertaining.  There's a mad love affair between a 16-year-old boy and a 39-year-old woman. There's a children's-book author and illustrator who seduces women at his book signings and gets them to model for him in degrading positions.  There's a scene in which one of his models tears up his drawings - inadvertently sending snippets of her own exaggerated body parts floating through town - then tries to run him down with her car.  Irving can write about these things in ways that are shocking, hilarious and poignant. Making them work on film is something else.  That Williams occasionally comes close to the author's layered spirit is a tribute to his passion. But the film fails on a number of levels.  First, it is what it is: the prologue to a story that covers four(!) decades. The major character in the novel is a 4-year-old girl in the movie. Shorn of its future, the tale of the Cole family comes off as a kind of bleak burlesque, populated by self-absorbed, self-pitying, self-loathing or self-gratifying losers.  Irving's novel traces the effects of the accidental deaths of two teenage boys on their parents, Ted and Marion Cole, on their daughter, Ruth - who is conceived out of grief, as a replacement child - and others who come into their lives.  In the movie, set in the present, the boys have been dead for a few years. Marion (Kim Basinger) is in nearly catatonic grief. Ted (Jeff Bridges) is an alcoholic misogynist and womanizer. Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's look-alike younger sister) is obsessed with her dead brothers' gallery of photos.  As summer begins, Ted announces his desire to separate from Marion on the very day his summer intern, Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), arrives. Eddie bears a resemblance to his oldest son, which Ted thinks might please Marion.  It sure does. She decides to initiate the boy, and for the summer, she is reborn. Meanwhile, Ted is driving his latest seduction victim, Evelyn Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), to distraction with his increasingly vulgar and degrading demands.  Both Bridges and Basinger are miscast.  Basinger, at 50, is a decade too old, and she plays Marion less as the walking wounded than as the walking dead. Her inexpressiveness seems better suited to a zombie movie.  Bridges, on the other hand, is so brilliantly engaging, you can't help but empathize with him. Yet, Ted Cole is as irredeemable a fictional character as Irving has ever imagined.  Rogers, meanwhile, wins the courage award for a scene that should have been rethought. To display Vaughn's degradation, Ted has her posing naked on a turntable, which he cranks around, giving the audience a 360-degree tour of her body.  I didn't mind the view, but given the gynecological nature of Ted's drawings, Williams could have made the point better without putting Rogers on the Lazy Susan.  Movie Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat  The Door in the Floor  Tod Williams Focus Features 07/04 Feature Film R - strong sexuality, graphic images, language  Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) is a famous author of children's books who is past his prime and wiling away the time at his East Hampton house. He is in the midst of separating from his beautiful wife Marion (Kim Basinger), who alternates between staying at the house with their four-year old daughter Ruth (Elle Fanning) and residing at a room in a town nearby. To perk up his spirits, Ted hires Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), a young man from his alma mater, Exeter, who wants to become a writer. Having lost his driver's license, the author needs someone to drive him around. He is spending a lot of time with Eleanor Vaughan (Mimi Rogers) on the pretext that he is sketching her in the nude. Her gardener Louis (Eduardo Gomez) doesn't like him very much. Although Ted always tells admirers that he is just a writer of entertainment for children, Eddie is convinced that he is much more and he can learn many things from him. These high expectations are dashed when his new employer reveals that they will play things by ear during the summer. Ted shocks the callow youth by undressing in front of him and continuing their conversation while he's taking a shower in the open air. As a writer's assistant, Eddie thinks he'll help with revisions on Ted's latest work, but all he actually does is type and retype a few misplaced punctuation marks. When Ted finally gets around to a critique of a piece that Eddie wrote, he doesn't exactly give him a shining recommendation or encourage him to continue in the craft. With nothing much to do, this young man pursues a popular teenage pastime: masturbation. When Marion walks in one day when he is using her clothes laid out on the bed to arouse himself, he's ashamed, but she handles the discovery as a compliment. She invites him out to dinner and comments on how serious he is. She inquires why he hasn't asked Alice (Bijou Phillips), the nanny who takes care of Ruthie, out for a date. He replies that she isn't his type. Marion gets the picture and takes him by surprise with an offer of sex with her. They don't talk very much since she is still mourning the tragic loss of her two teenage sons in a terrible accident a few years earlier. Eddie realizes that the wall between Ted and Marion is built out of grief. Even worse, it has made a natural loving relationship with Ruth near impossible. Eddie is not old enough to understand the immensities of feelings in Marion's loss but he is glad to have been given the miracle of her body and their many evenings of sex together. Writer and director Tod Williams has adapted John Irving's 1999 novel A Widow for One Year — actually the first third of that story — for the screen with remarkable fidelity to its ample themes and spirit. Jeff Bridges puts in an Academy Award caliber performance as the quirky, self-absorbed, and creative Ted. Kim Basinger gives an subtle and touching performance as Marion, conveying through her soulful looks and sparse words a wide range of emotions. The metaphor of "the door in the floor," the title of one of Ted's children's books, also refers to the sense of loss that has swallowed their marriage. In Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen has written: "The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life." It is fascinating to see how Ted and Marion have tried to cope with the loss of their two sons. Their strategies make it near impossible for them to be intimate with each other anymore. The person most affected by this is Ruth, who at the tender age of four seems to have been psychologically damaged by the haunting presence of her two brothers. She was born after their deaths, but they are enshrined in a series of photographs lining a long hallway of the house. Not a day passes that she doesn't study them. The emotional education that Eddie receives in his affair with Marion and in his encounter with the selfishness and creativity of Ted is one that will serve him well if he ever becomes a writer. The screenplay contains plenty of nuggets of wisdom about this arcane and difficult craft. Ted tells him repeatedly that it is very important to always describe in detail what is going on in a scene: what one sees, smells, hears, and feels. This gift is revealed again and again in the Williams' screenplay — these characters and their yearnings come alive through the details that illuminate their actions and behaviors. The Door in the Floor is one of the best films of the year and along with The Cider House Rules stands as another successful screen adaptation of a John Irving novel.
	17  luglio: THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR è uscito negli USA in piattaforma limitata lo scorso 14 luglio in sole 47 sale. Dal 23 luglio sarà invece presente in 105 sale. Ecco i primi (ottimi) dati del box office: 14.07.04 - # 20 $67,685 - / - 47 / $1,440 $67,685 / 1 15.07.04 - # 22 $59,610 -11.9% / - 47 / $1,268 $127,295 / 2
	18 luglio: In narrow release, Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger's The Door in the Floor had a healthy debut, taking in $444,983 in 47 theaters. The family drama was adapted from John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year.  Total groos: $ 572,000 (Media per sala: $9,468).