Word: tomei
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...couple of things going for it. One is the precedent of last year's much lauded You Can Count on Me, also about dark currents running through small-town life. The other is that In the Bedroom boasts a terrific comeback performance in a pivotal role by Marisa Tomei, who has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Spacek and Wilkinson are up for Best Actress and Actor, respectively...
...unfair to single out Tomei when Spacek and Wilkinson so gracefully manage most of the movie's heaviest lifting. But they have always been predictably expert actors. Tomei's career path is radically different. She came out of nowhere to win the supporting-actress Oscar, over more prestigious competitors, for her hilarious work in 1992's My Cousin Vinny. Then, and just as suddenly, she faded into off-Broadway plays and smallish roles in obscure films, where she also gained a reputation as "difficult." Now she's back, and damned if people aren't talking Oscar nomination again...
Playing about a decade under her true age (37), Tomei is Natalie, a warmhearted, lower-class single mom who has made two mistakes: marrying an angry rich boy (William Mapother) and then, while separated, taking up with Frank. Theirs is a true love. But the affair crosses class lines. His mother worries openly about it; if the kid persists, he could end up a lobsterman instead of the architect he wants to be. Matt indulges his son; he thinks this is just a phase. Who's right, we'll never know. For Frank is killed. So, more or less...
...Helen Mirren are the frontrunners here, Connelly having taken the Globe and the AFI award, and Mirren having won multiple prizes from critics’ organizations. Behind them, in a tight pack, are Mirren’s castmate Maggie Smith, In the Bedroom’s Marisa Tomei and Iris’s Kate Winslet, as well as Vanilla Sky’s Cameron Diaz and Bandits’ Cate Blanchett. Of the five, Tomei’s and Smith’s films are the most prominent in the Oscar race, and will lift the actresses to nominations...
...Bedroom is not a film for the romantically twitchy or the ideologically itchy. But this precisely calculated piece--beautifully acted by Tomei and the rest of the cast--is a very fine movie for those who value exquisitely rendered emotional truth. Is there, one wonders, an Oscar category for that...