The Door in the Floor Still Dazzles 20 Years Later

When Tod Williams’ The Door in the Floor opened in theaters on July 14, 2004, Rolling Stone called it “extraordinary in every way, from the pitch-perfect performances to the delicate handling of explosive subject matter.” Based on a section of John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, the film captures the eventful summer that a children’s book illustrator (Jeff Bridges) and his estranged wife (Kim Basinger) invite an idealistic young man (Jon Foster) to help them care for their daughter (Elle Fanning).

20 years later, this film continues to dazzle audiences and defy expectations. A few years ago, Podcasting Them Softly wrote that this “criminally underrated masterpiece…creates human beings that feel like people in the real world, imperfections and all.”

Watch The Door in the Floor now on Apple TV.

Williams told MovieMaker Magazine how he’d picked up Irving’s novel in the late ‘90s and “read the first section, 183 pages, in one sitting and was immediately struck by the need to make it into a film.” As a young and fairly unknown filmmaker, Williams spent three weeks crafting the perfect letter to convince Irving to give him permission to adapt that part of the novel. To his surprise, Irving gave him the rights for one dollar, asking only for approval of the script, cast, and title. He not only greenlit the script and title, but helped get Bridges to star in the film. He told The Guardian that The Door in the Floor “is the most faithful translation, word for word, to the film of any of the adaptations written from my novels.”

While Williams’ screenplay carefully captured the tragic and comic calibrations of Irving’s work, the film was very much the director’s own creation. Setting the story in the Hamptons, the idyllic beach town where Williams spent his youth, the filmmaker used the area’s reputation and landscape to express the emotional complexities and contradictions of the movie. For The New York Times, “The film was shot in the sun-splashed Hamptons…but the bright surface masks the depths of this family's sorrow.” Indeed, remembering his own experience, Williams told New York Magazine that “the Hamptons look and feel like the most seductive place in the world, and then it rots before your eyes.”

Shot with “a gauzy radiance that makes the drama's dark intensity all the more poignant,” writes The Wall Street Journal, the film fully explores the complexity of its characters. Bridges “does his best work in years,” writes Variety, playing a writer “seemingly self-effacing yet self-absorbed and full of the sense of entitlement.” Eye For Film writes, “Basinger turns in a career-best performance” as a mother traumatized by grief. Their stories, both simple and surprising, continue to astonish audiences. For Rolling Stone, “You can’t shut the door on this spellbinder. It gets into your head.”