I realize that whenever I think of the actor Tom Wilkinson, I think of Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth,” the poem that is recited to his Matt Fowler character after his son is murdered in Todd Field’s In the Bedroom. I knew the poem before the film, of course, but never grasped the melancholia of it, never fully the sense of things lost and unrecoverable to time, the concept of a kingdom of memory populated by places that are gone and versions of myself I would not now recognize:

There are things of which I may not speak;

      There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

      And a mist before the eye.

            And the words of that fatal song

            Come over me like a chill:

      “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Fields’ film is based on an Andre Dubus short story called “Killings,” its title suggesting that while there is only one death initially in the picture, the terrible psychic impact of it gathers in force until it claims multiple casualties. The scene that lingers for me is one where Fowler’s wife Ruth (Sissy Spacek) accuses Matt of encouraging their son’s relationship with the woman (Marisa Tomei) whose former lover is responsible for their son’s death because Matt enjoyed looking at this pretty girl his son brought home. She says he ignored the violence stalking her because his own ego was stoked by his boy’s conquest. “You were winking at him the whole time,” she says, “you encouraged him. You wanted what he had — her.” Wilkinson’s character, a doctor, well-respected, is outraged of course, but as he absorbs his wife’s accusations, there is this astonishing thing that flickers across his face. Is it guilt? There’s shock of course — the way he holds his hands to his side, the way his face blanches and how he licks his lips — but there it is, it’s guilt. 

She’s right. She’s so right that it causes him to respond with his own accusations, his own verbal violence. In a careful, flat cadence he brings up past hurts, those little failures of parenting that happen when you’re exhausted and as soon as you do it, you wish you could take it back. Matt relents when he sees how his shots are landing. He’s angry but he loves his wife of course. When we fight with the ones we love the most, we are never more hurt or more dangerous, and never more aware of how much you stand to lose if you forget even for a heartbeat to fight fairly. The cruelties he engages in to mask his own shame start to taste bitter to him. Wilkinson’s eyes flicker, uncertain. He retreats, mortified, but still makes it her fault. “You scare me,” he says, softly now “how can I talk to you when sometimes I can’t even look at you.” But you Wilkinson communicates how he’s sorry he’s hurt her, even if he felt justified to do it at the time, and how he’s broken by her truths about him, and after he steps away he comes back to say “what I said just now, I had no right.” Wilkinson is completely human at the extremity of his despair, completely in control of his responses and reactions, and where many would tip over into extremity, Wilkinson makes the decision to go softer. We can track every single thought in the progress of this scene: every realization, every emotion. That he doesn’t fall into histrionics on the one side or mawkishness on the other is the kind of highwire act maybe a handful of actors could ever have landed this effortlessly. Wilkinson doesn’t seem like he’s trying. He just is. 

It’s that essential stability that he brought with him to all of his roles, that reliable bedrock of unimpeachable credibility that made the period pieces in which he so often found himself feel tactile and believable. His Father Moore in Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose is key to the success of the film because his credibility is the motor that drives the suspense of the film. When he says he doesn’t care if he goes to prison for life so long as he is allowed to testify to the life and death of the young woman over whose exorcism he oversaw and fumbled, he has to be convincing. Even if Father Moore is mad, he needs to be driven by the power of the simplicity of his faith. Derrickson is known as a horror film director, but I think of him as not only a friend, but as, at his best, a creator of complicated familial dramas that are unusually empathetic in how we fight when we love one another. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is terrifying because Emily’s subsistence-level family is so beautifully drawn, because the lawyers battling over her legacy are dedicated the truth, and because Father Moore is as sturdy and inspiring as the North Star.

Wilkinson’s performance is dignified and understated. Any other decision would mark him the lunatic and the show a farce. About a third of the way in, Father Moore tells his lawyer (Laura Linney) that there are dark forces surrounding the trial and that she needs to exercise caution. She takes the warning as uncomfortable evidence that her client might be a lunatic. He senses that and rather than push his case, he retreats, softens his voice, turns away the force of his conviction. Wilkinson reacts in a way that we can track but his lawyer might legitimately read as natural. It’s, again, an impossible trick that he lands without a stumble. Derrickson is the perfect partner for Wilkinson’s subtle dance here and again later when Father Moore is told of the death of a friend and puts a hand to his face. He holds his mouth, his head, and then makes a fist and rests it under his chin as though he isn’t really sure what to do with it and so chooses a gesture of violence that he turns into one of succor. In court, his lawyer argues “Father Moore’s belief in this matter is crucial” and I have to agree. I don’t know if the film works without the gravity of Tom Wilkinson’s humanity. 

It’s that credibility, that humanity, that makes the supernatural a matter of arbitrable belief here and severe mental illness a biological failing in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. In either case, the easy call is to lean into theatrical affectation, but Wilkinson, in both roles, is terrifying for his recognizability as a human being of depth and contradiction; of how but for the grace of whatever, he could be you or me and we could find our roles switched through misfortune or misadventure. We are good like him; we are moral and capable as he is and we are, aren’t we? Isn’t he? How many films wouldn’t work without his decency? Without his ability to ground high concepts and triphammer scenarios to emotional consequences with the intimidating weight of his realness? He made everything better.   

My favorite Tom Wilkinson performance comes in one of my favorite films, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In it, another character recites a different poem to him, a snippet from Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard:”

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;

Something about Tom Wilkinson attracted poetry, I guess. In the film he plays another doctor, Howard Mierzwiak, and the person serenading him is his young assistant, Mary (Kirsten Dunst) who does not know that she’s had the memory of an affair with the good doctor erased by the very technology Dr. Howard has invented. Smitten again and alone with him and a patient, she recites this fragment from memory as piquant reference to the film’s themes of how it’s better to have lived a life of pain and suffering with just a little bit of exquisite joy than to trade that joy for a surcease of sorrow. Life is only pain leavened now and again by sublimity — and those brief flashes of real happiness are, despite or because of their briefness, the only reason to be alive and also worth it. Dr. Howard listens to Mary ramble at him and we watch an older man aware that a much younger woman is interested in him. When we watch the scene again, we see Wilkinson’s discomfort as not just embarrassment for the girl creating an impossible situation from her inexperience, but a predator who has taken advantage of not only young women who admire him, but this young woman. 

How Tom Wilkinson did what he did was never as important as his consistency. I don’t know how he did it, only that I can’t think of a time in which he failed to do it. He is like M. Emmett Walsh in that way, or J.T. Walsh, modern character actors who became whatever it was that was asked of them and in the becoming, gave their projects sincerity and real stakes. Tom Wilkinson leaves behind a legacy of over 100 appearances in film, television and stage where he once played Horatio in his 1980 West End debut — Horatio, the character who grounds Hamlet’s delusions with the bedrock of his credulity. When Horatio sees the King’s ghost, we know the ghost is real. And when everyone else has gone, it is Horatio’s duty to tell the tale. Wilkinson died on December 30, 2023 at the age of 75 surrounded by his family in the North London home where he lived. Here’s how Longfellow’s poem ends, as fine a eulogy as any for an artist who worked in time with whom we had this amazing privilege to intersect for a while:

And Deering’s Woods are fresh and fair,

      And with joy that is almost pain

My heart goes back to wander there,

And among the dreams of the days that were,

      I find my lost youth again.

            And the strange and beautiful song,

            The groves are repeating it still:

      “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.