The film, about a dead man who comes back as a boy, tries to resurrect ideas and techniques that worked for Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick. It was born to fail.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published October 28, 2004
[Photo: Fine Line Features]
In Birth, Danny Huston and Nicole Kidman star as an engaged couple whose lives are turned upside down when a 10-year-old boy enters the picture.
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The most preposterous film of the fall season is Birth, not for its central theme of reincarnation, but for how everyone reacts to the possibility that a cherubic 10-year-old boy may house the resurrected soul of an adult man and for the ways director Jonathan Glazer attempts to goose the proceedings by harkening back to past films.
Chiefly, Glazer robs the grave of Rosemary's Baby by inventing an insular urban apartment community to fret about the possibilities. Rosemary's Baby had good reason to keep a supernatural birth secret; everyone in the building except Rosemary knew her unborn child was the spawn of Satan.
Nobody in Birth knows why a child (Cameron Bright) claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, but they all sit around the same apartment discussing it, seeking no outside help except the boy's equally confused parents.
The widow is Anna (Nicole Kidman, wearing a neo-Mia Farrow hairdo), who's celebrating her engagement to another man 10 years after her first husband died while jogging in Central Park. His name was Sean, same as the boy who crashes the engagement party, claiming to be her dead husband and demanding she not marry again.
Little Sean knows many personal details about Anna and her family, eventually convincing her that he's telling the truth. Anna's fiance, Joseph (Danny Huston), is initially curious, then amused, then worried when so many impossible memories (and one distasteful scene) pile up. So far, so creepy.
Then Glazer's movie makes every possible bad move, including a climactic twist rendering useless everything that preceded it. If the ending is true, then little Sean couldn't possibly be who he claims to be. But how did he know so many intimate details? Filmmakers can't have it both ways.
Birth also annoys for its shameless cribbing from better suspense films. In addition to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Glazer steals moves from the late Stanley Kubrick, such as lingering tight closeups slowly revealing thought processes, chilly tints, classical music interludes without Kubrick's sense of irony and gliding shots (like the opening Central Park jog) that are sheer mimicry. Kubrick turned tedium into art; Glazer makes it his film's signature.
Kidman's performance isn't bad, but she isn't good enough to carry a closeup that lasts for minutes while Anna decides if little Sean is bona fide. She staggers through an uncharted character arc between the decreasingly aggrieved woman introduced at the outset and the emotional wreck she becomes. There's a fine line between sad, irrational and insane. Kidman stomps all over it.
The suspense collapses as soon as the notion of sex is raised. Even if Anna dumps Joseph for Sean, how could he legally satisfy her carnal desires? The answer is left dangling, even after the scene that already made Birth notorious: little Sean stripping to join naked Anna in a bathtub.
The publicity this scene has generated reminds me of the hubbub over Colin Farrell's deleted frontal nudity in A Home at the End of the World. There's more found in dirty imaginations than on the screen. We never see Anna and Sean's private parts, and they never make physical contact. The kid nestles himself so far away in the bathtub that he might as well be soaking in the toilet. The scene arrives with gossip fanfare and departs with the awareness that it's just a publicity stunt for a movie that could use the hype.
Birth
GRADE: C-
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer
CAST: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall, Anne Heche, Peter Stormare, Ted Levine, Arliss Howard
SCREENPLAY: Milo Addica, Jean-Claude Carriere, Jonathan Glazer
RATING: R; sexual situations, nudity, profanity, mild violence
