WhatzUp

Birth
by Derek Neff

There is a scene in Birth that, for the beauty and audacity of its execution, is nearly worth the cost of the entire movie: our heroine, Anna (Nicole Kidman), having finally accepted that her dead husband Sean really has been reincarnated into the body of a 10-year-old boy, experiences an episode of wordless, transcendent emotion while at the opera. The camera lingers for what seems like forever on Anna’s face as she feels whatever private emotions she’s feeling. The scene has no dialogue, no action and very little movement. This goes on for minutes. It is beautiful, hypnotic and completely uncalled for. It will drive some viewers crazy.

As the confused, grieving wife, Kidman does about as well as the script - and director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) - permits her to, but the movie as a whole ultimately takes itself far too seriously. The situation is essentially absurd, and without some degree of levity we are really being asked to swallow too much. The boy/reincarnated husband, Sean (played with nary a smile or smirk by Cameron Bright), is such a wet blanket that you begin to wonder why, if this is what her real husband was like, Anna ever loved him to begin with. Anna’s rich mother (Lauren Bacall) is positively aghast at the impudence of this gauche young boy who comes crashing into Anna’s life. Anna’s new fiancÈ, Joseph (Danny Huston), treats young Sean as a romantic rival and would probably strangle him if he could get away with it. Anna herself doesn’t

seem to be asking Sean the right questions, the questions that would determine once and for all whether or not this boy is the real McCoy, or just a socially maladjusted imposter.

This is one of those movies where people don’t talk even remotely like real people talk. The dialogue ponderously skates around the surface of things without ever actually accomplishing much. (Harrison Savides’ cinematography, however, is flat-out superb; at once precise and lyrical, with a warm autumnal pallet, Savides’ work is the real star of the show, just as it was in Elephant.)

Much has been made of the scene in the bathtub between Kidman and the boy, but there’s really nothing here to get worked up about. Sean and Anna just say more of their poetic-sounding things to each other, trading solemn and profound looks, while we do our best to suppress a yawn.