A woman dying from cancer asks an old friend to be in the room next door when she takes her own life.
The Room Next Door, the latest film from the grand artist of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez that I have not read, but the story couldn’t be more well-suited to his style.
Ingrid, a successful novelist, played by Julianne Moore, discovers that Martha, an old friend with whom she’s been out of touch for years, a former war correspondent played by Tilda Swinton, has cancer. When she visits her in the hospital, it turns out that the cancer is clearly terminal. In a gap between rounds of chemo, they reestablish their friendship, Ingrid visiting Martha in her Manhattan apartment, and the two of them going out in the city together. Martha has come to the conviction, defiantly asserted, that she doesn’t want to die helpless and in agony, which is evidently her fate if she continues to fight. Then she makes an unusual request.
Almodóvar always relies on dramatic and melodramatic plots. But they’re a means towards expressing certain themes that occupy him. It’s true that the movie is “about” euthanasia, and the ethical and legal questions surrounding it are a topic of some discussion, but the interest always lies in the characters and their feelings, ideas, and relationships. This is his first English language film, and what I noticed is that his methods and approach are basically the same as in his other recent films, by which I mean those in the last decade or so. In his late style, if you’ll pardon the expression, he is more grounded in issues of suffering, mortality, and the achievement of “life wisdom.” At the same time he’s polished a smooth, almost Hitchcockian cinematic texture. The images, the editing, and especially the music (by Albert Iglesias, who has composed the scores for the last three decades of his movies) signal “mystery thriller,” with the trick now being that the mysteries and thrills have to do with the inner life, and not so much the plot.
Swinton and Moore fit seamlessly into Almodóvar’s universe. Swinton’s character in particular is made to plumb the depths of her feelings and insights very quietly, and the actress really shines here. There are some compelling extended flashbacks: Martha has an estranged daughter, and she tells Ingrid the story of the girl’s father and his bizarre and frightening death. Then we see her during the Iraq War when she encountered a couple of Carmelite priests maintaining a Catholic church in the midst of the chaos. These are not pathways to melodramatic complications, as they might have been in the director’s early career, but windows into the character of this remarkable woman.
John Turturro appears in a provocative and sometimes amusing part as a friend of Ingrid’s who was once one of Martha’s lovers, and is now a source of advice on how to handle the situation. But this is essentially a two-hander, and the two actresses are very moving in their characters’ vulnerability and willingness to wrestle with the beauty and tragedy of life, nature, memories, the body, and the meaning of death. Yet there’s always a lightness of touch that conveys wonder and appreciation.
Almodóvar no longer feels the need to please anyone but himself, and that really comes across strongly in this intimate and beguiling film, The Room Next Door.
