Performance Profile: Marisa Tomei in In The Bedroom (2001)

Of the fresh faces in cinema the 1990's memorably established, they're have been those who captured their glimmer but only to have it fade, and those performers who have embraced it and continued to let it soar. This next nominee can rightfully and thankfully placed in the latter category, and after infamously but deservedly winning in 1992, it took Oscar and the public by surprise when a knock-out punch of a performance was given by....

...Marisa Tomei in In The Bedroom (2001)

Marisa Tomei plays the Natalie Stout, the young, single mother of two who's caught up in the middle of a divorce while balancing a romance with a young college student on the beautiful landscapes of Maine.

The film opens with Natalie and her lover Frank (the subtle, effective, and sadly unnominated Nick Stahl) --enjoying a sunny afternoon and basking in their giddy love for one another -- as both seem to cherish and appreciate each individual moment in time that is spent in the mind and gaze of each other.

While Frank has his own issues to deal with; whether to go to grad school or to stay in Maine with his girl and his parents (the powerful Tom Wilkinson and the disappointing Sissy Spacek), Tomei's Natalie has her own fair share of problems that she is in the midst of solving herself. She's stuck battling a nasty almost ex-husband who she wants finally break away from, she has two young children to devout her loving time to, and she's beginning to realize that her love life with Frank is not so sturdy as she may have thought, as his parents and others around them scoff at the idea of the two as a couple.

Yet, even as they are being preyed apart from each other by the world around them, the two find solace and a special place within each other.

A place where Natalie can feel important and secure and she's so certain that she desperately needs both...but at the same time Natalie is not really even sure what she wants or how to get it. In short, she's simply confused and mixed up in a life she wants become a grounded reality. Tomei punctuates these early scenes with a sense of uncertainty and real happiness she finds in the humble pleasures of living a good life. The actress, with her sweet charisma, also emanates a light, lively hood which amplifies the goodness, positivity, and appeal of a woman who's intentions are decent, but still hang in the air and haven't yet fallen together.

Unfortunately everything falls apart and the shit truly hits the fan when Richard, her ex-husband, viciously attacks her home and throws her into a state of panic.

With her mind racing and her heart pacing she gets Frank by her side, and with his loving embrace, she thinks that maybe everything might have a chance of being alright.

That is until a gunshot to Frank's head and the loss of a lover, a protector, and a friend have passed away with Frank's kind soul, and stirs up something devastating beyond words for Natalie. Tomei cranks up the tension and believability of this scene with natural, painful simplicity -- something which elevates her performance to come.

Now struck with a heavy sense of grief while her life slowly crumbles away, Natalie is again stared down into a dark corner of desperation by those around her and connected to Frank and his murder. The happy, steady existence which she tried her hardest to maintain has snapped and shattered, and it looks like she just doesn't have the glue to make things right. The once cheerful mask of hope and optimism has faded to reveal something simply heartbreaking.

Tomei brings Natalie's tragic arc from page to screen with vivid, almost beautiful simplicity which fits the mold of this mostly engaging film. Her approach to this tricky, complex role is held with a consistent ease and nuance, a big accomplishment is her precise, subtle underplaying -- when she could have easily mired Natalie into a shrill, frantically overwrought state, thus creating an obvious emotional vaccum.

But what I came to admire the most in the performance are the subtle, magnificent ways Tomei uses her face to etch a unforgettable portrait of human devastation.

She totally works her gifts as a dramatic actress to their core; her distinctly expressive face is a sound board of deeply moving, rich emotional clarity that conveys every flickering thought and feeling building up within Natalie; her eyes -- the way she slowly moves them and such -- take us into a sad, troubled life of regrets, dissapointment, and failed dreams. Both take us beyond the confinement of the narrative and widen the scope and demension to create a real woman who could be anywhere in our world. 

Now if only the film respected the character as much...what am I talking about? I'm talking about the way In the Bedroom lazily never wraps us Natalie as written; her final scene is heartbreaking as tries to extended her warmest apologies to Spacek's Ruth, but only to get bitch slapped in rejection. She walks out even more of a mess, and that's it. But I do find some sort of redemption to these problem -- Tomei's performance had already established everything we need to know about Natalie, so maybe she just never recovers from her desperation, forever to be haunted by those demons. The character is given a detailed inner/outer life and maybe that's the point: that she is to linger throughout the air, just as she had before, and extended beyond the limits of the film. Either way its still completed, full work.

With this performance, Tomei proved her versatility and range as a solid, interesting, engaging actress that could nail dramatic acting, to those stuffy naysayers who dissmissed her earlier work as a "confection" or "fluke". Her accomplishment in In the Bedroom is astonishingly genuine, human, and moving; a standout in a wide, underrated career of shining gems.