Without a good story to fall back on, In the Cut overdoes the obvious.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published October 30, 2003
[Screen Gems]
Meg Ryan, left, plays Frannie Avery and Jennifer Jason Leigh is her half-sister Pauline in the steamy but ultimately silly In the Cut.
The prerelease hype for In the Cut focused on Meg Ryan's "brave" decision to play her first graphic nude scenes. The girl next door becomes the slut upstairs, that sort of thing.
Big deal. Diane Keaton went Looking for Mr. Goodbar 26 years ago. The resemblances between that film and Jane Campion's excessively moody drama are close, except when Campion takes the whole sex thing too seriously for anyone's good. Everything is about sex in In the Cut, to the point that the neurotic erotica gets old, then silly.
Ryan plays Frannie Avery, a college professor in Manhattan who's a little uptight about sex. Her psycho ex-boyfriend (Kevin Bacon) thinks she should stick around because they did it, her half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is so obsessive that she steals a lover's dry cleaning so she could sleep with him again, and a student (Sharrieff Pugh) is making not-so-subtle advances.
Frannie can't even go to a public restroom without getting hot and bothered by seeing a couple engaged in oral sex in the shadows. She stares close enough to see the man's wrist tattoo, a three of clubs. Later, the woman's decapitated body is discovered. Tattoo guy must have done it.
Detective James Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) and his boorish partner (Nick Damici) are investigating. Malloy is all libido, interrupting official business to flirt with Frannie. Oh, and he sports a three of clubs tattoo on his wrist.
Frannie has sex with him frequently anyway, which is almost as dumb as her later arousal after discovering another severed head and the film's ludicrous final shot suggesting that more violence has her rarin' to go again. It's all supposed to be arty, you see, as Campion (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke) is wont to do. In the Cut overdoes everything, taking the fun out of erotica, the suspense out of mystery and the sense out of spending money to see the movie. The script by Campion and Susanna Moore (working from her novel) is a spawning ground for red herrings capped by one of the silliest resolutions you'll see this year, in a setting the likes of which we've seen too many times before. And the movie takes its sweet time getting there, sidetracked regularly by so-called meaningful dialogue.
And, of course, sex. Ryan certainly sheds her goody-two-shoes image along with her clothes, starting with Frannie's explicit first encounter with Malloy and continuing through the blood-soaked finale. Ruffalo plays the mumbling mysterious stranger too close to the vest, never convincing us that Frannie would risk her life for his company. But it's their couplings that are selling the movie and really are the only reason to see it, only as a curiosity piece.
In the Cut
Grade: D
Director: Jane Campion
Cast: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kevin Bacon, Nick Damici, Sharrieff Pugh
Screenplay: Jane Campion, Susanna Moore, based on Moore's novel
