Almodovar's First English Film at Lincoln Center
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore Enthrall
By: Susan Hall - Oct 05, 2024
Pedro Almodovar will receive the 2025 Chaplin Award at Lincoln Center next spring. Some say he cannot make a bad movie. Certainly the painterly frames of each scene in his new film,The Room Next Door, are worthy of inclusion in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA. Is their purpose, in this film, to distance us in time from the subject of the film, euthanasia?
There was a time when Caroline Heilbrun’s book on the subject was only available in Room 315 at the New York Public Library (along with Mein Kampf). Emilia Clarke’s wonderful movie Me Before You, in which a young man paralyzed below the waist in a biking accident, chooses to die in a Swiss Clinic, was suppressed by the Catholic Church.
My friend Sharon’s mother cost a million Medicare bucks for her stay in ICU before she died. Lily was kept alive by a relative who thought he was giving her what Bill Gates would have had–a painful, month-long death in ICU for that magic figure, a million Medicare dollars.
Oregon, Colorado, Washington, California and Vermont have all passed ‘dignity’ at the end of life legislation. One friend went to Oregon to die. Fay upped her morphine dose at Dana Farber in Boston. Alice chose starvation in New York. (An unfortunate phrase for the end of life at home surrounded by family and friends). Ted told me that his family kept asking if he wanted to go, and he had said ‘no’ up until that day. But the next time he was going to say ‘yes.’ He did and was easily assisted at home by hospice-delivered morphine.
Ours is a generation that is going to choose dignified death. Some friends may turn away, as we are told they do in The Room Next Door. Yet many people who have watched insane efforts to keep a person breathing for a few more painful and expensive days will now choose the ‘dignity’ option.
Wonderful performances by Tilda Swinton (Martha), who makes the dignity in death choice, and her foil, Julianne Moore (Ingrid), can not overcome the outdated feeling of a story that would have been better served by placing it more clearly in the past. If the beautifully framed scenes of The Room Next Door were intended to do this, they don't accomplish the mission.
Martha’s only child was fathered by a man traumatized by service in the Vietnam War. His reprised death scene is curiously numbing. It recalls the prairies of Badlands combined with the swept landscape of Christina’s World and is oddly off-putting as the wife has an unaccounted-for accent (some of the casting was of Alnodovar’s usual suspects from Spain). John Turturro, who both women shared as a lover earlier on, is credited with superior sexual prowess. He is unsexy in his interactions with Ingrid.
This is not to say that the film is not beautifully made, as are all of Almodovar’s works. Women actors are well-served by his camera and his directorial touch. Yet Thee Room Next Door feels off the mark despite the commanding performances and magnificent framed images.