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By Dan Leone

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NANNI MORETTI HAS made his name as a self-conscious, self-reflexively comic character in films often about himself. He's a gentle soul more like a harmless Ross McElwee than a souring Woody Allen, but fans of his international hit Caro diario, should be warned that the frothy layer has been removed from this ale. Moretti creates a character with distance from his own persona this time and plops him down into a cruel family drama. Read no further if you don't want the spoiler: Moretti plays Giovanni, the well-adjusted father of a comfortable family whose son unexpectedly dies in a scuba-diving accident. Comparisons to In the Bedroom, frequent as they are, are actually appropriate – but where that film displayed its red-white-and-blues by grafting revenge and violence onto its story, The Son's Room manages to chip away at the icy grieving process without the heavy-handed plot maneuvers. Its metaphors are simple and central: Giovanni is a psychiatrist attending to the kooky, sometimes touching neuroses of his wayward middle-class patients. So the balance – and slightly comic tone – dramatically shifts when Giovanni experiences his own drama. Moretti transfers his anger back onto the needy patient who kept him away from his son the morning of the accident and quickly begins to lose everything he seemed so smugly sure of before; the happy morning-espresso routine of Giovanni's family life turns into a world of cold leftovers. A letter from a girlfriend of the son's who no one knew existed almost makes the house of cards crumble. But in true Moretti style, the director can't quite let go of his optimism. Catharsis is not the final reward here: Moretti cares enough about the characters to follow them to what might not be a bitter end. (Susan Gerhard)