Cinema: The Appeal Of Her Zeal

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She has also never truckled to anyone. Even on In the Bedroom's happy set, she fought for her right to a Maine accent and for a budget-bending love scene she felt her character, and Stahl's, needed. That was O.K. with Field, who found her very low maintenance: "She cares, and not in a fanciful way. It's very practical." Says Tomei: "All you have going for it is the passion, the belief in it, the zeal to be there every day."

Zeal may be a quality some viewers will need in order to enjoy Bedroom. Once the lovers disappear, it settles into a film of silent accusations and deflected anguish. But that watchful waiting has a curiously instructive, ultimately hypnotic effect; this, one thinks, is really the way middle-class America hides its hurts. And those silences render more powerful the explosive confrontation between the grieving parents, in which a lifetime's evasions are blown away. They also make the movie's violent conclusion all the more startling, yet utterly right.

In the Bedroom is not a film for the romantically twitchy or the ideologically itchy. But this precisely calculated piece--beautifully acted by Tomei and the rest of the cast--is a very fine movie for those who value exquisitely rendered emotional truth. Is there, one wonders, an Oscar category for that?

--Reported by Jess Cagle/Los Angeles