The Bed You Sleep In

Jon Jost (All the Vermeers in New York) is the kind of filmmaker you either love or hate; I happen to belong to the latter camp. His latest exercise in still photography, The Bed You Sleep In, is set in an unnamed Oregon small town, where a lumber mill owner named Ray (Tom Blair) is struggling financially due to the spotted owl controversy. As Ray's world starts to collapse around him, his wife Jean (Ellen McLaughlin) receives a letter from their daughter at college accusing her father of childhood sexual abuse, and the story moves in a rather predictable--if glacially slow--fashion towards its tragic climax. While there are moments of beautifully naturalistic acting between Blair and McLaughlin, Jost's style strips the film of any power generated by the actors: He understands the "pictures" part of cinema, but is not terribly interested in making them "move." Which is not to say that the pictures are boring; on the contrary, Jost has a marvelous eye and a connoisseur's taste for primary colors, but, ultimately, this is film school stuff--something for professors to force their students to study, not something for people to enjoy. Optional. (R. Pitman)