'Marvin's Room' goes deep into the American psyche

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): There's something poignantly telling in the lyrics of Marvin's Room's theme song:

When the stars grow dim/ and your dreams grow old/ What do you do when the winter calls/ and flowers fall from the garden walls/ I come home to you/ you come home to me/ my love will be your remedy/ I'll choose you and you'll choose me/ we'll be two daughters standing by the edge of the sea.

When much of dysfunctional America is having problems with its nuclear family, other relatives can barely claim a place in their lives. Daughters break away from their family, sisters grow estranged, parents get transported to nursing homes, couples break up, single working mothers despair over their children, sons grow up bitter and dying becomes a frightfully lonely affair.

In 1992, a short while after finishing his play Marvin's Room, author Scott McPherson died of AIDS. Five years later, in the elegant movie adaptation of his play, we see a nervous Bessie (Diane Keaton) waiting to hear Dr. Wally (Robert de Niro) spell out her fate. Stifling fear, she starts to prattle on about her sick, geriatric father: "He's been dying for almost 20 years, and doing it so slowly, so that I don't miss anything."

But there is neither humor nor resentment in those words. Bessie is crushed, and the anxiety in her voice as she babbles on about her aunt Ruth is further indication that she has spent all her life thinking of little else but her family. Any potential illness that befalls her would seal their fates, too.

Aging certainly brings its own problems, loneliness and terminal diseases to name just two. Told she has leukemia, Bessie is no exception. Yet this opening scene, although startling in its toneless finality, drives the point home as the transitoriness of life suddenly explodes as well as implodes -- stark, suffocating, but frighteningly real.

No wonder that the way veteran stage-director Jerry Zaks frames that crucial moment is almost searing in its effect, for the implications of Bessie's horror is the heart of Marvin's Room.

Following a quarrel 20 years earlier with her only sister, Lee (Meryl Streep), Bessie has spent most of her adult life caring for her bedridden father Marvin (Hume Cronyn) and her senile aunt Ruth (Gwen Verdon). Lee, who is averse to any form of familial responsibility, chooses independence, and ends up with a broken life. Her eldest son, Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has just burned their house down, would rather hole up in a mental institution than be anywhere near her.

The two sisters rarely spoke in the 20 years that passed. They are as estranged as they are strangers to each other.

Yet Bessie has little choice but to ask Lee to come down to Florida as her chance of survival depends on a bone-marrow transplant from a family member. Along with her two kids, Hank and Charlie (Hal Scardino), Lee returns home to a slow and painful reconciliation with her sister until they both become daughters once more.

No sentimentalism

Although the subject of terminal illness has long been an overdramatized staple of melodrama, there is nothing sentimental or manipulative about Marvin's Room.

For one, this is a character study, not a study about illness. And then there is Bessie herself -- a woman so positive that sundered relationships cannot deter her from going about the business of living unselfishly and uncomplainingly. Unlike countless "liberated" women who feel that caring for a family member is equal to relinquishing one's independence, she doesn't feel bereft of anything ("I have been so lucky to be able to love someone so much"). Even in her waning days, her carpe diem is simply to go on doing what she's been doing all her life without perceiving it as a "sacrifice". Her liberation, indeed, lies in her enormous capacity to love.

Thankfully, there is no dehumanizing deathbed scene. Instead, the movie's entire magic lies in Marvin's enchanted smile as Bessie plays with the mirror by his bed, as if in the scattered flickers of light he sees Providence at the end of a dark tunnel.

Granted, there are a few quibbles. Okay, so Robert de Niro is barely there (after all, he gets to produce the movie). But given the focus on Hank, why have Charlie at all? And then there's the little-seen Marvin, a trifle odd given that it is his "room" around which the story is centered.

But shortchanging characters is almost inevitable because the potential for distraction is tremendous. First, the side issues: Lee coming to terms with reality, Lee despairing over Hank. Hank trying to make sense of a family he's never known. Bessie reaching out to the "son" she never has. Second, there's Bessie's illness itself. And last but not least, there's Marvin, a heartrending vision in his incontinence, speaking not words but sounds only Bessie can comprehend. Still, the movie never strays from its premise.

Keaton delivers

As we all know by now, an A-list cast alone doesn't a film make. DiCaprio's anxieties, for instance, are obvious, making his Hank a tad artificial. Although he found his fame playing troubled youths (This Boys' Life), everything he does now will seem a letdown after his mesmerizing portrayal of Romeo in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Likewise with Streep. Although her versatility is legendary, her bitter and guilt- ridden Lee simply pales in comparison to Keaton's heartfelt, delicately nuanced Bessie.

In fact, nothing that Keaton has done throughout her long and illustrious career approaches the honest enchantment of Bessie. Imbued with none of Keaton's ditziness of yesteryear, Bessie is pure and beautiful even in her vulnerability (after she faints in Disneyland, she cries to Lee, "I was afraid to close my eyes, afraid that I won't wake up").

Predictability aside, Marvin's Room is another graceful and uplifting triumph by Miramax, and one that burrows right into the core of the American psyche.