‘The Room Next Door’ is Almodóvar’s Latest Gem
Pedro Almodóvar teams Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore for a rich slice of classic Hollywood melodrama in The Room Next Door.
In five decades of feature filmmaking, Pedro Almodóvar, like any great artist, has produced distinct periods: the provocative early comedies, star-driven mid-career dramas, and latter-day meditations on pain and glory.
Now, in the midst of his seeming Blue period, the quintessentially Spanish filmmaker dawns a new era with his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door. The dialogue flows to a different beat — less rapid-fire staccato — but the film looks and sounds like Almodóvar, from the bursts of color in the costumes and art direction to the dynamic strings-heavy score by longtime collaborator Alberto Iglesias.
And he’s once again working in the mode of melodrama Hollywood studios used to call the “woman’s picture.” That sub-genre, ruled at its ’40s peak by the likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, featuring female protagonists coping with moral conflicts and matters of the heart, still has a pulse, sustained by a hardy few, like filmmaker Todd Haynes (May December) and muse Julianne Moore, who co-stars here opposite Tilda Swinton.
An eminently watchable pair, Swinton and Moore pose striking similarities and contrasts as, respectively, war reporter Martha and novelist Ingrid, close friends who lost touch years ago. They reconnect after Ingrid learns Martha is hospitalized with stage 3 cervical cancer. Martha informs her friend the cancer is inoperable, and, though she’s been undergoing experimental treatment, she’s not keen on wasting away in pain.
“You can’t be self-possessed if you’re in agony,” Martha insists, contemplating taking matters into her own hands. Ingrid, instead, advocates for fighting until the bitter end. “Death feels unnatural to me,” she says.
Almodóvar lends the film’s first act to the pair’s re-acquaintance, as Ingrid makes regular visits to see Martha in the hospital. Old friends from faster days in ’80s New York, they fall back into an easy, mutually attentive rapport, rendered tenderly by Moore and Swinton, who is also forceful in portraying Martha’s will to have her way.
Both stars get to shape lovely solos and duets, as the two writers chat about all things literary, opining on the complicated relationships of the Bloomsbury Group, and quoting Joyce’s The Dead. They’re a bit pretentious but earnest.
In pensive monologues, Martha also spills the past few decades of her struggles with her daughter, Michelle, from whom she’s more acrimoniously estranged. Her past plays out in flashbacks filled with vivid notions of Americana: happy hippies at a bowling alley, diner milkshakes topped with whipped cream and a cherry, a red Dodge pickup driving a long ribbon of road, and the Vietnam vet who returns from the war haunted by death and violence.
Some of the details lean too kitschy or land awkwardly, as in an overacted scene of a good samaritan rushing into a burning house in a field of grasses by a country road. But Almodóvar and his cast maintain the mood of deep introspection on motherhood and mortality, even through sharp jabs of humor, and the plot’s escalation into a more active, suspenseful middle half.
Once Martha draws Ingrid into her risky plans to face her death head-on, the film’s rhythms shift accordingly. Yet, hovering just beyond the action is the question of why two friends as close as this ever lost touch in the first place. Out of good manners, they blame their busy careers, and the fact that Ingrid lived for a while in Paris.
Then, in walks a man, author and lecturer Damian Cunningham (John Turturro), whom they both dated, though not at the same time. Moore and Turturro, recently a fine romantic pair in Sebastián Lelio’s epitome of a woman’s picture, Gloria Bell, form another compelling duo here, with Turturro injecting the film’s biggest laughs as utter pessimist Damian.
But, much to the credit of Almodóvar and author Sigrid Nunez, upon whose book, What Are You Going Through, the film is based, the looming ex isn’t the answer to questions hovering around Martha and Ingrid, or their plans for the future. Whether to choose life or death, in a moment where such a choice ostensibly exists, each woman determines her fate entirely on her own.
The Room Next Door (★★★★☆) is rated PG-13, and opens Friday, Jan. 10 at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Bryant Street in D.C., and Angelika Film Center at Mosaic in Fairfax. Visit www.fandango.com.
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