Long Island couple struggles with grief

Heavy clouds hang over the idyllic eastern Long Island home of Ted and Marion Cole. Even when the sun shines, the shingle-style house overlooking a lake and, beyond, the ocean, is shrouded in sadness and loss. In The Door in the Floor, an unsteady adaptation of the first third of John Irving's A Widow for One Year, the Coles - played by Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger - are steeped in grief, reeling from the deaths of their two teenage sons.

Ted, a celebrated children's book author and illustrator, directs his angst outward. He's living the role of the artist in broad strokes, making grand pronouncements, drinking plenty, having affairs - currently with the moneyed woman (Mimi Rogers) who's posing nude for him in his studio.

Marion has gone inward. She'll sit in her chair on the sloping lawn facing the reeds, the water and the sky, hunched up, silent, alone. The long hallway of the Coles' second floor is lined with photographs of the dead boys - it's impossible to forget them, and Marion isn't trying to.

And then there's the couple's surviving child, a little 4-year-old, Ruth (Elle Fanning), who wanders the hall looking at the brothers she never knew, talking to them.

The Door in the Floor, adapted by Tod Williams (The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, another tale of family dysfunction), is about what happens when a prep school kid, Eddie (Jon Foster), comes to work for the famous Ted Cole one summer, running errands for the author and falling in love with the author's wife, the mournful Marion.

A handsome-looking movie that's full of the muted greens, browns and grays of the tony Hamptons, director Williams' tale never quite finds its footing. Although Bridges brings his middle-aged narcissist to life with full-fisted glee, parading around his plush digs like some Sagaponack Picasso (but hardly ever touching his paints, or his typewriter), Door in the Floor has a glumness, and stiffness, that drags its comic possibilities down. And clearly, by the film's final act, Williams is going for the comic: The morose tone the picture has taken is upended by farcical comings-and-goings, by drunkenness and desertion played for laughs.

While Bridges rides around town on his old bike (shades of Ed Harris' Long Island artist saga, Pollock), commanding the screen, Basinger is a still-life of brooding beauty. It's a fragile performance, and as Marion warms to the notion of seducing the teenager Eddie (he is about the same age as her eldest boy when he died), a quiet playfulness appears in the actress' eyes. But it's too quiet, really, and remote - Basinger doesn't seem to be digging deep for the role, for anything.

Foster is fine as the quiet young virgin from Exeter; the little Fanning (younger sister of Man on Fire's Dakota Fanning) is a natural; Bijou Phillips plays a disaffected nanny with suitable disaffection, and Eduardo Gomez provides comedic stereotyping - and some wayward watering hoses - as the Spanish-speaking gardener who watches disapprovingly as the great Ted Cole wrecks some lives.

Contact film critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.

The Door in the Floor ** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Ted Hope, Anne Carey, and Michael Corrente; written and directed by Tod Williams; photography by Terry Stacey; music by Marcelo Zarvos; distributed by Focus Features.

Running time: 1 hour, 51 mins.

Ted Cole. . . Jeff Bridges

Marion Cole. . . Kim Basinger

Eddie O'Hare. . . Jon Foster

Eleanor Vaughn. . . Mimi Rogers

Ruth Cole. . . Elle Fanning

Parent's guide: R (nudity, sex, profanity, violence, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz Five and Ritz Sixteen/NJ