Tod Williams's adaptation of only a fraction of the John Irving novel, A Widow for One Year. That fractionalization may account for the slight feeling of aimlessness and lack of focus. The basic situation is tidy enough: an aspiring author in his junior year at Exeter comes for the summer to work as the personal assistant, mainly chauffeur, to a successful writer and illustrator of children's books and unsuccessful straight novelist. "I'm just an entertainer of children," is his practiced line of humility, "and I like to draw." His beach house is a shrine to his two dead sons, ex-students themselves at Exeter, and he keeps an apartment in town, alternating occupancy nightly with his estranged wife, allowing him ample freedom to chase the local skirts. The summer helper, for his part, cannot find adequate freedom even to masturbate, interrupted first by the husband when he's abusing himself over a black-and-white photograph of the wife, and then by the wife herself when he's abusing himself over her bra and panties. But that second incident serves as the springboard for an older-woman-younger-man thing, a Summer of '42 thing. A four-year-old daughter, the protagonist of the complete novel, is not so much caught in the middle of all this as caught on the periphery. Our natural point of identification, our point of entry into the entire situation, would seem to be the adolescent outsider, but while well played in an awkward, withdrawn, cowed manner by Jon Foster, he has a hard time holding the screen, and sometimes gaining admittance to the screen, in the presence of the Great Artiste, who on the other hand is not so much to be identified with as made sport of, in his Lawrence of Arabia caftan, or in his Van Gogh straw hat, or uninhibitedly in the buff. Jeff Bridges does a nice job of shoring up his defenses and not tipping us off that he's in on the joke, except in one off-key episode of rollicking, romping comedy around the jilting of a well-heeled lover and the pick-up of prospective mother-and-daughter replacements. (The distinctively Irving punch line: just when Mom wants to know what sort of posing they'd be doing in his studio, a shredded sketch of the jilted lover's vagina lands face-down on the car's windshield. ) Kim Basinger, as the estranged wife and sexual initiator, holds a pivotal position but is too static and stationary a figure to command much interest: a pair of dark eyes in a pale face, almost a plaster mold with bottomless holes instead of eyes, a mask of tragedy. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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