The Room Next Door - Swinton and Moore save Almodóvar’s movie from itself

There’s much about Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, his first feature in English, to commend it. There’s also a lot of elements that don’t cohere and that ring strangely off.

The best of all this is seeing Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton share the screen. Moore’s Ingrid gets slightly short shrift as it is, after all, Martha’s death (and life) that takes center stage. Swinton, once again, turns in a quietly strong performance and Moore supports her expertly. 

Before whinging on about what I feel are the film’s shortcomings, I want to stress a few things right away. Almodóvar is bringing death and the right to one’s own “good death”, as Martha says, front and center. The scenes between the two women where both are confronting Martha’s immanent demise are reminiscent of some of Ingmar Bergman’s work between Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman in Autumns Sonata. There is strength and sensitivity that is rarely seen on view here, and if the dialog feels somewhat stilted or stylized (which could be attributed to Almodóvar writing in English instead of Spanish), moments do work, very much in the same way that some of Ingmar’s dialog was doing so much heavy lifting thematically and from the personal space of the characters. 

In many ways, you see why Almodóvar wanted to make this movie in English. The approach to death and dying is about as American as one can get. On the one hand, Ingrid represents many (most) people who are afraid of death, likely don’t want to discuss it, and has written a best-seller about her fear. Martha, conversely, is ready. She’s been dealing with fourth stage ovarian cancer, is the guinea pig for an experimental treatment, but has had enough. The prolonging of a life where one is repeatedly racked by chemo and a therapy that doesn’t seem to work becomes increasingly unbearable. 

Martha calls into question what it means when your quality of life deteriorates so much that you eventually will become unrecognizable, over the course of losing your mobility, your independence, and a decreasing sense of self. She questions what it means to fight against a fatal disease; as a war correspondent, she conveys the irony of society’s egging on of the patient to rally and fight. If you win, you’re seen as a victorious warrior, but if you lose, you’re merely a victim. The patient is then defined by the illness and Martha finds this untenable, as well. 

She’s called upon Ingrid to be with her during her last days and spares her discovering her body after she’s euthanized herself with a drug bought online over the Dark Web. She’s created a cover story for Ingrid and left a letter for the police to assure them that Ingrid didn’t know she was going to take her life.

Ingrid, despite her fear of death, agrees when she learns that other friends opted out. She had promised she’d be there for Martha and is true to her word. Thus, the set-up.

Then there are other themes and plot devices that support and somewhat detract from the central point. Ingrid and Martha discuss a shared lover, Damian (the always wonderful John Turturro), who Ingrid tells about Martha’s plan. Damian comes out to visit Ingrid once she and Martha have removed to a small town in upstate New York. He tells her that he’s retained a lawyer and is solicitous about Ingrid and given to a moment of speechifiying about the environment and how what Martha is doing should be lauded; humans having ruined the planet. It’s a fine interlude until he begins the tirade, which while it may be the point, is one of several clunky moments that distract from, again, the relationship at the movie’s core. He tells Ingrid that he admires her because she can suffer without making others feel miserable.

A similar distraction comes in the form of a trainer at the gym Ingrid goes to who at one point hears her tale and how difficult it is for her. It comes across more as an acting exercise, both in each character’s speech, the blocking, and the camera framing. It’s not bad, per se, and I suppose that when the trainer says he’d like to give Ingrid a hug but that isn’t allowed, given the current moment and the gym’s policy against touching, but it seems to exist only to underscore how many barriers exist among the living, as well as the great barrier that Martha will be crossing through. “Only connect.”

There seems to be an unusual amount of self-conscious compositions from scene to scene that lends a kind of start-and-stop to each change. It’s as if Almodóvar wants to let the import of what’s being said seep in, measure by measure. That’s kind of the other issue. There are less story beats here than whole measures. This has its benefits in providing a rhythm to the film but it also has its drawbacks in perhaps getting lost in detours, as if there was a passage from another work inserted in the current concerto. 

The references to James Joyce and his work The Dead are on-the-nose, and too much so. Martha quotes the final passage about snow falling twice. Once when she’s just talking to Ingrid and again, she silently mouths it at the end of the John Huston film adaptation that they’re watching later in the film. The passage is quoted a third time by Ingrid when she sits outside on the deck with Michelle, Martha’s estranged daughter (also played by Swinton, and actually, really rather convincingly). These echoes have a determined elegiac quality but also come off as somewhat arch. 

I can’t recall offhand a more measured work by Almodóvar; he’s never, of course, shied away from emotional vulnerability or from frank discussion about the finitude of life; we also have his playing on identity with having the same actress play two different roles (a kind of echo of Buñuel’s casting of two different actresses in the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire), but there is a languidness to it all that works for the film in giving space to the two actors to explore their and each other’s characters more and against it in that kind of halting and moving scene by scene that I’d mentioned above.

I mentioned above that it felt like Ingrid is somewhat underserved and it becomes more obvious as the film wears on. We have spent most of the film listening to Martha and following along with her on her journey, but Ingrid should have a more prominent voice; what did she actually cover in her book about her fear of death? Has she changed since she wrote it? We don’t really see her grapple much with it and the only time we actually do see how it might affect her is when she sees a signal that she and Martha had agreed on that would let Ingrid know Martha was gone. She is visibly upset, vomits in the kitchen sink and cries outside on a chaise longe on the deck. What we do get from Moore is a vast sense of empathy, understanding, and strength that seems to undercut any phobia she might have.

After Martha’s death and Ingrid has called the local police, she’s interrogated by a cop who suspects of her of being in on the scheme and is more or less, a stand-in for that part of society that sees suicide as a crime, both civil and religious (he says that as an officer of the law and a man of faith, he sees what Martha did as a crime and Ingrid her assistant in that crime). Again, it’s another awkward moment that doesn’t serve any real purpose other than the polemical. And again, perhaps that’s what Almodóvar wants, but it detracts from the emotional heft of the film (as did the interlude with Damian, and the gym trainer segment).

Therein lies the issue. I really wanted to connect more with both Ingrid and Martha and at different points, it almost felt as if that happened, but the stilts dialog and framing would take me out of the film and erect a screen between me and the movie screen. To be clear, it’s isn’t as stagey as some films I’ve seen that attempt a similar approach, but I almost feel as if this would have been more effective as a stage play.

Almodóvar is a master and this film is by no means a failure, but I felt badly for him as what he’s presenting us with is vital and important; I just wish he’d had a second set of eyes on the script or he’d found another way to address some of the points he was making in a less clunky manner. That said, he did bring two of my favorite actresses together. Perhaps if they work together again, it’ll be with stronger material.