| SEAN OF THE DEAD : Jonathan Glazer’s Birth [7/10] |
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| Friday, 18 February 2005 | |
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Successful Manhattan businesswoman Anna (Nicole Kidman) is celebrating her engagement to Joseph (Danny Huston) when 10-year-old Sean (Cameron Bright) turns up unnanounced at her apartment. The child calmly informs Anna that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband, whose name he shares, and who passed away ten years before. Anna's initial bemusement rapidly turns to distress as the eerily self-possessed Sean continues to insist that he is telling the truth - until eventually her skepticism crumbles under the weight of her mounting emotional confusion. Meanwhile young Sean's claims come under separate scrutiny from Anna's MD brother-in-law Bob (Arliss Howard), and from Clara (Anne Heche), the wife of the deceased Sean's best friend Clifford (Peter Stormare), who has secrets of her own... 2000's Sexy Beast announced the welcome arrival of a bold, exciting new British directorial talent in Jonathan Glazer. Though not a conspicuous commercial success, the picture soon gained - thanks largely to Ben Kingsley's Oscar-nominated turn as gangland psycho Don Logan - a genuine cult following. Expectations were sky high for Glazer's followup, especially when it emerged that Birth would be based on an original script co-written by Luis Bunuel's longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere. As invariably seems to happen with projects to which Kidman is attached, however (The Stepford Wives, Panic Room, the aborted Pay the Girl, Eucalyptus and Baz Luhrmann's Alexander the Great), Glazer's Birth ended up being a troubled and protracted affair. What finally emerged presumably wasn't quite what the film's backers at New Line Cinema had been expecting: material which could easily have become a box-office-friendly chiller for Hallowe'en (Cameron Bright having already made an impact in the otherwise dire Godsend) instead turned out to be an extremely poised, decidedly arty but bravely unblinking exploration of grief and mental instability, its sombrely non-sensational tone much closer to "classy" seventies variations on the theme like The Possession of Joel Delaney or The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. The box-office consequences were brutal - Birth lasted about a fortnight in the UK, and has since very seldom popped up on the country's repertory/second-run circuit where audiences tend to favour more approachable, accessible titles such as Vanity Fair, The Motorcycle Diaries or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I was out of the country during Birth's blink-and-miss-it multiplex run, and had to wait three months before it was shown at a relatively nearby cinema - and even this necessitated a 70-mile round-trip. Was it worth it? As the lights went up at Stockton Arc, I wasn't sure - Birth is a distinctive, different type of film, one with a lingering impact. It isn't an especially easy watch - at times, it seems like almost everyone on screen is behaving in an unhinged or, at the very least, off-beat manner, and the picture might have been an unbearably solemn and cerebral were it not for the gloriously no-nonsense contributions from a top-form Bacall ("And how is your cake, Mr Reincarnation?"), clearly happy at finding herself on solid ground after her last Kidman collaboration, Dogville. After a terrific, intriguing opening, the picture seemed to paint itself into an impossible corner: and the means of escape employed by Carriere and his fellow-scriptwriters (Glazer and Milo Addica) initially seemed disappointingly cheap. But the more I thought about the ending (which won't be revealed here) the better and more psychologically coherent it seemed - in terms of the state of mind of the major characters- even if, by any standards, the events depicted aren't logically plausible. But the concentration on emotions here is primary - it's interesting that we never know (or care) what Anna actually does for a living - and the ending demands to be taken on these terms. The problem many viewers have with Birth is perhaps that we're led to believe the film is going to be one thing, only for it to turn out to be something completely different: in retrospect, however, this is exactly the situation in which Kidman's Anna finds herself, though to go into any more explicit detail wouldn't be appropriate for this type of review. What's clear, however, is that Glazer has done his level best to compensate for the script problems (which also beset Addica's overpraised work for Monster's Ball) by pushing the material to its very limit in terms of imaginative and intelligent direction. He pulls off a remarkable extended, Queen Christina style close-up of Anna wrestling with her emotions at a classical music recital - a sequence that places a massive burden on Kidman, which this ever-improving actress proves eminently capable of carrying. So skilful and enthralling is his bold control of sound and image - the contributions from Alexandre Desplat (score - with terrific selections from Wagner) and Harris Savides (chilly, wintry cinematography) are top-drawer - that we're always willing to give Birth the benefit of the doubt. Even so, there several points - including a bathroom scene which provoked much outcry at the Venice Film Festival - where the essential tastelessness of the situations depicted becomes an inescapable problem: it's bad enough with Kidman and Bright in the roles, but just imagine the outcry if the sexes of these characters had been reversed and it was, say, 37-year-old Guy Pearce sharing a bath or pondering a relationship with, say, 10-year-old Man on Fire star Dakota Fanning. It's unlikely that such a film would never have seen the light of day at all - never mind a belated one-off stint at the Stockton Arc. Neil Young 18th February, 2004 BIRTH : USA 2004 : Jonathan Glazer : 100 mins Seen at Arc cinema, Stockton (UK) 17th February, 2004 - public show |
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