21/16
Appeared on The 7PM Project: Episode dated 9/8/2024 (2024)
Tale
In their youth, Ingrid and Martha were close friends when they worked together in the same magazine. After years of inviolability, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation. Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature film in English. I was curious to see what Pedro Almodóvar would do differently in his first non-Spanish language film built around two of today’s most talented actors.
The answer, unfortunately: it’s disappointing
There are many ways in which "The Room Next Door" it lacks what makes Almodóvar’s work so unique – the spontaneity, the sense of improvisation, the comic timing, the effervescent ensemble work – but as far as I’m concerned, this film’s biggest flaw is that it ; is just simply overwritten, which is rare in his earlier works. The screenplay (which he wrote) is adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel, which I haven’t read, but it sounds like has been removed verbatim from large samples of the dialogue, which is very heavy and uneven, slowing down and emptying the film, where for Almodóvar´s work is usually characterized by cheeky dialogue and crazy forward movement that takes you into the characters' a world with little introduction – as a viewer, you’re kind of there, hanging on for dear life, figuring out relationships and social context along the way, grabbing what you can. Even in movies that deal with dark subjects (“Pain and Glory” or “Bad Education” come to mind), the action and its background unfold in compelling ways (even if they’re really crazy if you stop and think about them) that draw on intuition and empathy and just hang on from a marginally expanded explanatory narrative. Here it’s the other way around, with the characters constantly talking and explaining, with a few awkward flashbacks to create context.
Little is left to our imagination
So while there are some of the usual Almodóvarian hallmarks, notably the fine use of rich, cleverly coordinated color and the tastefulness of many of the sets and costumes (there are lots of lovely arrangements of flowers and fruit), these are mere props – they don’t tell the story and don’t make you accept his madness the reality of his artificial visual worlds in the same way as in most of his films. And the computer generated backgrounds of New York feel completely artificial and thus become meaningless. Almodóvar’s films certainly have a plot, often quite convoluted (which is part of the fun), but they don’t feel plot-driven, even if they are. “The Room Next Door”, on the other hand, deals with its plot, and it is weaker for it.
But the wordiness of this script especially undermines Swinton
With talent like Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (and the estimable John Turturro) in front of the camera, there are and are some great, often very moving moments – how could there not be, especially given the plot’s central premise and the way it both reinforces to strain a long-time close friendship in its final days? His great strength lies in his powerful, enigmatic presence and his understatement. In my unscientific experiment, he speaks as much dialogue here as he has in at least his last three or four films (that is, the ones I’ve seen) combined. Consider her stunning performances in another fairly recent film about a bitter relationship between two women, "The Eternal Daughter" (2022), in which she devastatingly plays both an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter.
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