Review: Birth

Director Jonathan Glazer's ferociously witty and savage Sexy Beast established the filmmaker as a formidable talent, to be watched and feared. His follow up, the elegant chamber piece Birth, is so polarizingly opposite of that gangster film, it's astonishing that the two were made by the same man.

Birth is a confounding picture, full of ideas and morals, all of them complex and substantive. Detailing the escalation of grief that a widow (Nicole Kidman, masterful) feels in the wake of her pending nuptials (10 years after her first husband died), Birth presents an important question: what is it about the person we love that makes us love him or her?

Cameron Bright plays a boy named Sean, who claims to be Anna's husband, whose name was also Sean. He shows up at a birthday party and sets off a series of carefully orchestrated set pieces, emotional showdowns between the young Sean, Anna and her increasingly skeptical and angered family.

The magnetic Danny Huston (one of our most underutilized master actors) plays Anna's fiancee with a mesmerizingly controlled rage. First ambivalent, then annoyed, then mildly jealous, then overtly hostile, Huston's performance is the kind that enthralls and stuns, but is seldom recognized with awards, because it is so ambiguous what his emotional motives are.

Glazer's film has the aura of a European thriller, with equal parts Rosemary's Baby and Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (indeed, one of Glazer's co-writers, Jean-Claude Carrière, wrote the latter film's script). His staging of the action is through a series of exquisite and intimate set pieces. Anna and Sean become more dangerously entangled, even as the "truth" grows ever murky.

The picture's climax appears to be a bit of a letdown on the surface, until one realizes that the entire film has been truly leading to precisely that feeling. Birth's ambiguity is purposeful, specifically because love, happiness, grief and loss are so closely entwined, often we can no longer separate them. Glazer directs with a sure and steady hand and delivers one of the more remarkable and enigmatic pictures of the year.

At the center of the film are two astonishing performances. Kidman and Bright play off one another beautifully, with equal parts of forcefulness and restraint. Much has been made of the scene wherein Bright joins Kidman in the bathtub. While wrongminded critics suggest this nearly glorifies pedophilia (I mean, come on), I felt it was essential in suggestion just how lost both of these souls were. It's a defining moment of cinema this year, one of daring and intrigue, one that suggests that, no matter what we expect, there are artists out there who will challenge our expectations and our limits.

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