Birth

I have a problem with “realistic” stories that introduce an entirely impossible element and then play out to see if the audience and its characters fall for it. To me, this is cinema gimmicking in order to neglect some of its most central duties – to establish and/or explore a world, realistic or not (these duties need not be mutually exclusive). Not that movies can’t increasingly reveal their little universe throughout, but to establish a film under the pretense of reality, only to have something totally unrealistic happen just once in the beginning, and then to ask us to treat the film like the characters – that is, from a realistic point of view – is, for me anyway, impossible. It’s pretty cheap to make us accept something we’d never actually accept in reality, only to pull the rug out from under us, or even just to ask us to be angry at all those in the picture who are acting just as we actually would. Especially frustrating is the mandatory scene in which the hero hopelessly explains to disbelievers that the impossible really is possible. The scene is meant to be frustrating to the hero, but which is actually even more frustrating to us, since it really isn’t possible. But perhaps the worst thing about these inventions is that they are the prologue’s equivalent of deus-ex-machina – for the most part, they exist solely to incite the frustrating story.

Compare this sort of movie to the Charlie Kaufman films, for example, in which characters accept the unfeasible impetus like we’d accept any old scientific breakthrough, and the device serves to establish that world the characters will explore for most of the rest of the movie. There, there is no pretense of the reality that will be falsely disrupted. But Birth has a new solution – it more or less relieves the story of any significant set-up, so we’re never led to believe that we’re actually in some sort of reality, and we are never led to share in the frustration and disbelief of the central characters. This is also Birth’s primary problem.

What set-up there is goes something like this: A scientist jokes about his wife being reincarnated in a voice-over, goes running through Central Park, and dies. Ten years pass, some boy sees some lady burying something, and then some boy, probably the same one, shows up at the dead guy’s wife’s place (she’s Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, about to get married to some new guy) claiming he is no longer his parents’ child, but is in fact her ex-wife reincarnated (end of set-up). Everyone laughs it off, but the kid sure seems to know an awful lot. It is hard not to think of Rosemary’s Baby – the anxious wife confined almost entirely to interiors of very nice New York Apartments as she questions if her husband is honest, or perhaps human – but the movie, even with its ably twisting tracking shots, is not played for suspense. In fact, it’s not really played for much of any quality, really, except maybe prettiness.

Now 1st acts aren’t always necessary, even in traditionally arching stories, to introduce the audience to the characters. A lot of great movies have used stories as means to discover its personalities – think of all the (noir) stories out there about the washed-up heroes who get caught up in something that will reveal who they really are. But it’s hard to avoid establishing characters if the story is going to be an exploration of how those characters can be significantly changed, since there’s little reference point that allows with us to relate to them in the first place, or to track their change (I’m thinking Requiem for a Dream). Birth is also concerned with obsession - even after ten years Anna is still deeply in love with Sean - but unlike Requiem, it’s not even able to come up with much insight into what these characters are like while changing, or once changed (granted, Requiem had a pretty simplistic view of its altered characters, but then again, it was a rather shallow, if tyrannical physical addiction that was changing them). Nicole Kidman is a great actress, and she does a wonderful job making very emotional faces to the camera, which itself glides frequently to superbly expressive classical music – but to what effect? It’s all nicely done, but Birth is ultimate proof that in a classically constructed film, the script reigns supreme. And the script here sucks.

Really, I should have been desperate to my own dismay to know if this kid was a reincarnation or an imitation, not merely curious. On the one hand, the kid is so dour and serious, so foreign from any kid we’ve ever seen (although he evidently has gained friends, probably from before his body was overtaken by the dead guy), that he instantly seems to be sent from another world, he is so clearly the reincarnation. But then again, he’s so dour and serious, that it’s impossible to mistake him for the former Sean , who in just the couple seconds we hear him in the film emerges as quite a playful guy. None of the characters (who for the most part are probably slightly less intelligent than the average audience member for this movie) gain this second insight, and any sympathy they had with the child, whether he really was the ex-husband or not, made me unsympathetic to them, because this stupid kid was so totally unlikable. Whether or not he was real was one of the last concerns I had about the movie.
Birth completely lacks the charm needed to get through its genre. Maybe seemingly impossible things can happen, but it’s better seen as whimsy, and even in a movie like Miracle on 34 Street, (or most other Christmas movies) which has just about all the problems I mentioned earlier, delight and capriciousness really is enough to carry the film to greatness, or to become a crowd-pleasing classic, anyway.

But Birth is stagnant, despite its attempts at enormous expressionism, and is off-putting - the embarrassing bathtub scene, like the best parts of Rosemary’s Baby, should raise some laughs and gasps, though I have a feeling these are far, far less intentional here, and act to a far more detrimental effect. Stuck with an interesting and dumb enough premise and conclusion, the movie has no idea what to do with the time in between, resulting in the lack of character development or anything really to engage the audience besides some nice craftsmanship. At one point I thought there could have been an interesting question of whether remarriage is a sort of extramarital affair, but the notion, like the beauty Birth is so obsessed with generating, is squandered as the movie sinks into its oddness.