Dreary pretensions of Stanley Kubrick; endless, pointless close-ups; oppressive/depressive seriousness; a creepy kid; reincarnation; Nicole Kidman romantically kissing a 10-year-old; stringy-haired Anne Heche; plus child-porn charges and boos from Venice Film Festival critics equals ... a throbbing at my temples the approximate weight and mass of a newborn.
Which brings us, unavoidably, to Birth, the year's silliest bundle of celluloid bushwa.
Credit this abortion, however, for birthing one of the great movie-speak howlers. We can't share it because it's a plot-spoiler—for anyone mistaking this drivel for drama—but it's uttered late in the movie, in the john, by Kidman with an astonishingly straight face (she is an Oscar-winner) and includes the words "dead husband" and "bathtub."
The story? If we must.
Kidman is a widow about to marry an upstanding bore (Danny Huston), when this kid (an unsettling Cameron Bright) with a cherub's face and haunted eyes shows up, claiming to be her dead spouse, reborn. After initially dismissing his ludicrous claim, she reconsiders, triggering an avalanche of angst.
Director Jonathan Glazer, who last scored with Sexy Beast, is grindingly self-indulgent, absorbing far too much of Kubrick's stately, deliberate style—almost to the point of paralysis—and nowhere near enough of Kubrick's subversive genius.
Birth is a gray, grim rumination on life after death, reincarnation, and love and faith, lumbering along with irksome pretentiousness, particularly with a confusing denouement that wants to have it both ways on reincarnation, winding up with neither.
Kidman, wearing a boyish coif, apparently to subliminally link her to this peewee poltergeist, does what's required, including the brief, controversial bathtub scene in which the boy climbs in with her.
Child porn? No. There's nothing sexual, or even Jacksonian about it. Creepy and off-putting? Oh, yeah. As is the shared smooch (not to mention when she asks him if he can handle her "needs"). But those scenes would be passable in a film that made its take-it-on-faith premise potentially plausible, legitimizing the characters' actions.
In a role that doesn't become clear until near the climax, Heche is convincingly strange (insert snotty joke here), and Danny Huston barely keeps his dignity as Kidman's upright, increasingly unnerved finacé. Lauren Bacall, now looking like she belongs on Mount Rushmore, is coldly effective as the family matriarch.
But Kidman speaks for the audience when her Birth character mumbles, "You make no sense."