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With its exploration of the human condition in a time of both tragedy and ecstacy, it could just as easily have been a fall release and be talked up as a possible Oscar contender -- especially for lead actors Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.
The source material is problematic, yet interesting. Writer-director Tod (Kip) Williams took the first part of John Irving's A Widow For One Year and made it his core story.
I say problematic only because Irving's dense novels, with their psychological complexities, turn into movies after many years and great difficulty, and not always successfully.
Like The World According To Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire or The Cider House Rules, The Door In the Floor (the name is plucked from a children's book within the saga) is one of the good ones. Williams has simplified the structure of the Irving novel without, it seems, sacrificing the core elements: The essential truth about love, sexuality and their relationship to profound grief.
As a movie, The Door In The Floor is set in a summer in the Hamptons. Bridges and Basinger are a married couple struggling to cope with an unspeakable tragedy that reveals itself in flashbacks.
She is nearly catatonic. He is a shamefully self-indulgent boor who appears to be struck by writer's block in his search for a new children's book. So, despite hiring an assistant -- a wide-eyed creative writing student from a university -- to help him with his writing, Bridges spends the summer doing life drawings of sensual women. Being a horny rascal, the women also become his lovers.
For Basinger's part, she also takes a lover -- shockingly. It is the young assistant (played with delicacy by newcomer Jon Foster). There is a bit of Summer Of '42 here, a touch of her reincarnating Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, as well.
But Basinger, besides looking smashingly sexy -- at 50 years of age, no less -- when she romps with Foster in the nude for her sex scenes, makes the character all her own. Aside from L.A. Confidential, Basinger never has been known for her acting prowess, but here she is remarkable, and not just for her hot bod.
Basinger shares a scene with Bridges -- who is absolutely fearless and wonderful, as always -- that will knock your socks off if you spend time thinking about it later. Like many great movie-acting moments, this sequence seems so subtle and quiet as it unfolds, yet resonates loudly later. I won't give away the context for the scene but it occurs when she is sitting silently in her convertible car with Bridges standing over her. Basinger says nothing and conveys everything. That's great acting.
It graces a fine film with uniformly quality ensemble work, including from support players Mimi Rogers, Bijou Phillips and the uncanny child actress Elle Fanning, an old soul in a young body.
Something this dark, this challenging, this good for adults rarely emerges in the summer season. Rejoice.
(This film is rated 18-A)