Bottoming Out

The movie picks up as Ted hires an assistant for the summer, prep school student and eagerly aspiring writer, Eddie (Jon Foster). Lanky and awkward, Eddie arrives ready to hang on Ted's every word and gesture, and he's almost immediately taken aback by his ostensible mentor's tendency to change clothes in front of him. The work is mostly menial — Ted sends the kid into town to purchase fresh squid ink, or has him retype the previous day's work on his electric typewriter, changing one word at a time. But Eddie is smitten, keen to absorb what he can. And Ted is pleased to hold forth: "Part of writing involves a certain amount of manipulation. Be specific: smells, tastes, detail."

And then he meets Ted's wife, Marion (Kim Basinger). Gorgeous, pained and remote, as she sits, sweatered and windblown, on a lounge chair overlooking the sea, she's the stunning embodiment of some sort of adolescent boy's dream (this would be the familiar literary convention, a la Stacy's mom, who's got it goin' on). She has Eddie drive her into town ("I know boys your age," she says ominously, "They love to drive every chance they get"), and leaves Ruthie in the care of a neighbor girl, Alice (Bijou Phillips, whose casting as a babysitter suggests these parents are not paying much attention to their daughter's welfare).

Eddie soon notices that Marion's lonely sorrow is compounded by Ted's philandering. She describes it in terms of stages: He seduces local women by offering to draw them, then demeans and dumps them. (Ted's favorite song, he tells Eddie while in the car one day, is Khia's "My Neck, My Back," suggesting just his fixation on body parts.) As Marion tells Eddie, the current mistress, Evelyn Vaughn (Mimi Rogers), "is going through the degrading phase right now." Evelyn's eventual effort at revenge is offered up as a series of arrhythmic antics (ripped-up drawings sailing through the seaside air, a kind-of car chase), but only underlines the pathetic self-indulgence and abusiveness of all of these so-called adults. (Again, this is an Irving trademark, the self-hating and much humiliated woman as "comic" device.)

The designated naif in this mess, Eddie is easily sucked into this emotional maelstrom, and soon starts bedding Marion, whose interest in him is odiously incestuous (he resembles a photo of her prep school athlete sons) and so, necrophilic. Even a dolt like Eddie might, in another movie, see the many layers of exploitation in this relationship, and yet this good student persists, as abusive and self-involved as his mentor.

When Eddie asks Marion why she hasn't left her husband, she says (by way of not-quite explanation), "Ted understands me. Ted's the only one who really knows what happened to me." Marion is so damaged, the film asserts, that she can't describe "what happened"; instead, when asked to do so, she lapses into a kind of waking coma, unable to move or speak, her eyes open, vacant and haunted. As if on cue, "what happened" is then revealed in grimly detailed flashback, so you might appreciate the depth of her woe.

Presumably, this depth motivates her sexual experimentation with Eddie, as they try out various positions, in places where they are sure to be found out. When Ruthie does discover them (doggy style), Ted comes to a bizarre sort of "rescue," as Marion essentially collapses under the weight of her own guilt. Again, her rationale is at once cryptic and fundamentally accusatory: "I'd rather be no mother than a bad mother," she sighs, as she doesn't quite justify her abandonment of all her children — Ted, Eddie and Ruth. She is, in Irving's universe, the perfect muse, the victim you can blame.