Review of Birth (2004) by Spangle — 17 May 2017

Championed by many as a modern day master of filmmaking, Jonathan Glazer has still yet to make a film that has actually been what I would define as good. Artistically top-notch? Sure. Are they good beyond that? Absolutely not. Sexy Beast comes the closest, but still falls short and Under the Skin is one of the worst films I have seen this decade (though, admittedly, I avoid awful films, so do take that with a grain of salt). Now, why do I think this film is below average? Quite simple: plausibility. Telling the story of a woman who is set to re-marry after the death of her husband ten years earlier, Birth introduces us to a young boy who is ten years old and claims to be her dead husband. Throwing her life up into the air, the reincarnation bit is not the implausible part. The implausible part is the utter lack of emotion.

Stiff, unfeeling, and unrelentingly cold, Birth is another film by Glazer that seems to misunderstand humanity. He was smart in making Under the Skin's protagonist an alien because it matched his inability to conjure up real human emotion and feeling. Sure, Anna (Nicole Kidman) falls in love with this young boy and gets mad at one point, while her fiance Joseph (Danny Huston) gets into a tirade at one point, but aside from these outbursts, the film is a quiet meditative film that never displays the confusion of the moment. Joseph just gets mad and questions Anna about the boy. Anna, as Kidman plays her, just goes through the motions and never seems to capture the raw emotion that the boy is playing with when he shows up and says he is Sean. For a woman hearing from a young boy that her husband is reincarnated in a young boy, she takes it pretty laid back and just gets sad at times. There is no moment where Kidman plays Anna as anything less than an implausibly calm and breathy woman who seems to be viewing the ongoing events around her as an absolute outsider.

The plotting itself is also quite disappointing, especially with the ending, though it is a crisis of the whole film. Throughout, Glazer includes scenes of people speaking about topics that we are already familiar with. One such example is when Sean's parents are first told about what he said to Anna and then go inside and talk about what he said to her. This even happens in individual scenes where Glazer opts to explain every detail instead of just leaving it up to us to fill in the blanks, such as when Clara (Anna Heche) tells Sean that the real Sean had given her the unopened letters. Explaining why he had given her the letters, this sequence is one that shows Glazer carrying on a scene for too long with the extra information only serving to undermine the rest of the film due to its implications. On one hand, the new Sean opens the letters out of guilt maybe for cheating on Anna. However, if that were true, he would know who Clara was because she is what makes him feel guilty, but he does not remember Clara. On the other, he read them and quickly began to feel that he was Sean, but was not actually Sean. This, again, would not explain how he knew everything about them, considering they were love letters and would likely not include details about where Sean worked and lectured or about Anna's brother-in-law's work as a doctor and potential infertility. Thus, the film reaches an impasse. It has no idea whether Sean was Sean or was not with neither really making complete sense. This issue arises solely because Glazer over-wrote the sequence with Clara to include more details regarding the letters and the reason why she was given them. Had he left some information out of that scene, it would have left the film far more open to interpretation and, as a result, better and more in line with the film's ominous feeling.

The acting on display certainly does help the film's cause either. Kidman, though I love her more often than not, has a knack of playing these inhumanly emotionless characters in lower budget features and Birth certainly qualifies. She seems to be wholly disinterested in the goings on and, with the production resting on her shoulders, this is detrimental to the final product. For such a brilliant actress who can play solemn and can play emotional, she just becomes cold at the suggestion that her husband is back. This is a man she has mourned for a decade and now he might be back. Sure, her initial confusion makes sense, but she quickly believes him because she wants to and then just becomes cold and unfeeling. Compared to her dead husband, it seems like she has less blood coursing through her veins than him. Around Kidman, the acting is fine. Lauren Bacall is strong here in a late period role, while Cameron Bright does about as well as can be expected from a young actor. Yet, unfortunately, the film rests on Kidman and she does not sell it at all.