Director Tod Williams, who also adapted John Irving's book "A Widow For One Year", is a relative novice behind the camera, and might have been in over his head here. Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger appear to have multi-layered, complicated characters to play, but since nothing is mounted particularly right, nothing gets resolved to the viewer's satisfaction--and the performances suffer as a result (they're not very attractive characters anyway, and Williams shows more quirkiness than sensitivity). A young college upper-classman seems to get a plum assignment: working as an assistant to writer and would-be artist Jeff Bridges, but Bridges is in the middle of a separation from wife Basinger, who has been benumbed by a family tragedy. Good-looking picture is edited in give-and-take fashion that shuts the audience out almost from the beginning, and all the catching up is arduous. *1/2 from ****

"The Hole in the Floor" is sort of slow going at times. Well, let's say it's leisurely. There is fortunately some sex and nudity in it, which perks things up a little, as well as a semi-comic episode in which Mimi Rogers tries to back her SUV over Jeff Bridges. Oh, and Bridges slaps young Jon Foster across the face and gets punched in the nose in return. That's it for the violence, unless you count psychological violence, and there's not much of that either.

It is, at least, not a movie about teens growing up or a movie in which Bruce Willis disarticulates an enemy. It's a movie for grownups and we must be grateful for that. They are rare birds.

What a miserable marriage it is, between Bridges and Kim Basinger. Whew. He's a sloppy author and illustrator of children's books; she's a mother deprived of two grown sons. She blames him for the death of the kids in a car accident. He's a womanizer who insists on drawing from nude models and then degrading them. (Rogers is one of them, and she fights back.) I sat through the story, watching the characters sidle their way through the rather simple plot, absorbing the luscious scenery of the Hamptons, where I used to spend summers (in a tent). What a place it was then, with residents like Abraham Rattner, Jackson Pollack, and John Steinbeck. Amazing really that people so rich could still have domestic problems, even as they sit around on the lawn furniture in their vast backyards like Gatsbies, drinking Heinekens beer and 25-year-old single malt Glennfiddich or something. I don't think I'd have any domestic problems. Would you? I'm kind of making fun of the movie and maybe I shouldn't, but actually it does kind of mope along. The detestation is all low key. The insults have very little bite or wit. They need to have been written either by Neil Simon or some catty gay guy.

Here's an example of what I'm getting at. All this buried resentment and so forth, we've seen before in, for instance, Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage." But as we reach the end of the movie, waiting for the climactic scene, the revelation of the "secret" that has been nudging Bridges and Basinger for so long, it just isn't there. The script and the direction tell us that the scene we are about to witness is "Important" and will leave us in awe. And what is it? Nothing much we didn't already know. The two sons died in a car accident. And when Basinger tried to retrieve her son's shoe from the wreckage, she found a foot in it. The first time I heard the story of the shoe with a foot in it was in an essay about the Normandy landings, written by a reporter on the scene. The next time I remember hearing the foot in the shoe was in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil." Well, true, this shoe had a whole leg in it but, still, what a deflation. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" gave us an imaginary child.

Nobody can fault the acting though. Bridges, getting older and bulkier, resembles his brother Beau a great deal. Basinger is at precisely the right age to give us a woman who has pretty much lost hope in her future. It is also her best performance, as far as I remember. She invests the character with a true resigned weariness. The kid she seduces, the Preppie played by Jon Foster, is okay, but not better than that. He's smart, sensitive, handsome, from a wealthy family, and has Kim Basinger crawling all over him. I hated him.

This well-acted tragedy pulls us through an exploration of the complexities of love in both the darkest and brightest corridors. Adapted from John Irving's best-selling novel, `A Widow For One Year', the film carefully weaves its way through the painful and tragic aftermath of a deadly accident, alternating between comedy and disaster.

The setting is in the privileged beach community of East Hampton on Long Island, New York where our hero, a children's book author, Ted Cole (Jeff Bridges) resides with his beautiful wife Marion (Kim Bassinger). Once upon a time, they had a happy marriage until the bliss was shattered by the accidental death of their two sons. The aftermath resulted in a general despondency and bizarre infidelities that did little to assuage the pain and dysfunction of their deteriorating relationship. The remnants of a once great love are hinted at in almost every scene, although alas are clouded over by their inability to regroup to face the future and put away the past.

Eddie O'Hare, (Jon Foster) the college junior Ted hired to work as his summer assistant and protégé, becomes the couple's unwitting, yet willing pawn, who ultimately evolves into the catalyst in the transformation of their bitter lives. Ted's recent children's book, `The Door In The Floor' in due course becomes the surviving metaphor for transforming their lives.

The evolving story seems to beg for something really horrific to happen, yet offers a kind of relief when this fear is unrealized. One senses that if this couple had only handled their loss differently, a far better result would have followed. It is also a poignant tale of a young boy's rite of passage becoming a man and another man sinking into an emotional immaturity and then hopefully climbing back out.

Directed and written by Tod Williams, this tale is quite apart from the usual Hollywood drivel that may leave you mired in an introspective quandary for quite some time.