Maybe it's coming too soon after the similarly titled In the Bedroom, or perhaps expectations were extraordinarily high after it won the Palme d'Or and FIPRESCI Award at Cannes, but The Son's Room seems like a big letdown.  Like Bedroom (and if you haven’t seen it, you might want to stop reading), this picture is about a family trying to come to terms with the death of a young son with a bright future, though Room's portrayal of grief is somehow much colder than Todd Field's film (plus there's no vigilante revenge plot because the death here is accidental).

Nanni Moretti, who wrote, directed and produced Room, stars as Giovanni, a middle-aged psychoanalyst with a wife named Paola (Laura Morante) and two teenage kids, daughter Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice). They're an attractive bunch who get on well, and since nobody wants to watch a movie about a happy, functional family, something tragic happens to make their lives screenworthy.  One morning, as Giovanni is about to accompany his son on a jog, he gets a call from one of his nutter patients (Silvio Orlando) and rushes to the man's aid.  Meanwhile, Andrea goes off with some friends and dies in a diving accident.

The remainder of the film shows Giovanni, Paola and Irene doing the mourning mambo while they get on with the daily grind of their lives.  Moretti focuses on the little things, like finding cracks in the china that had previously gone unnoticed, and it's heartbreaking to watch it unfold.  This family isn't anything like the highly dysfunctional, self-centered Burnhams from American Beauty.  They're warm, open and loving.  They ate together and even sang along in the car like some kind of Mediterranean von Trapps.  Then again, maybe that's just the way things seemed before Andrea's death.  We might be seeing everything through Giovanni's post-accident rose-colored glasses.  He thought his life was perfect, but there were chinks in the armor, as evidenced by Andrea's school suspension for theft.

Other than the grieving, there isn't much else going on here (unlike, say, The Sweet Hereafter or the first installment of Kieslowski's Decalogue), which essentially makes Room a very well-acted made-for-television movie. There are flashes of brilliance that separate the film from another Melissa Gilbert vehicle, like Irene's sudden aggressiveness on the basketball court, or Giovanni's stumbling onto a carnival and his subsequent trip on a spinning ride, but nothing to suggest this film should have won the Palme d'Or (especially considering its competition:  The Man Who Wasn't There, Mulholland Drive, The Piano Teacher, No Man's Land and even Shohei Imamura's wacky Warm Water Under a Red Bridge).

Strangest of all is Giovanni's quest to find a fitting song to pay tribute to his poor, dead son.  Well, the quest isn't the strange part (though it is a little bizarre).  The song he settles on is Brian Eno's "By This River," which means Room and Alfonso Cuarón's And Your Mother, Too, a pair of potential competitors in Oscar's Best Foreign Film race, both feature the same damn Eno song.

1:39 –

for language and some sexuality