Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writers: Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Danny Huston, Lauren Bacall
Runtime: 100 mins.
2004
Birth begins with an intrusion: a voice speaking over the opening production title cards. "Okay, let me say this. Let me say this. If I lost my wife, and the next day a little bird landed on my window sill, looked me right in the eye, and in plain English said, 'Sean, it's me, Anna, I'm back.' What can I say? I guess I'd believe her. Or I'd want to. I'd be stuck with a bird. But other than that, no, I'm a man of science, I just don't believe in that mumbo jumbo. Now that's going to have to be the last question, I need to go running before I head home." From there, a lengthy tracking shot of a man jogging down a snowy path, the camera lurking behind and above him like unseen doom. This is underscored by some absolutely gorgeous strings and woodwinds, the first hint of Alexandre Desplat's stunning compositional work throughout the film.
The man runs until his heart gives way and he quietly collapses beneath an underpass. We cut to a newborn baby, emerging from a pool of water.
The opening five minutes of Birth hand us the blueprint we need to watch the rest. Already the film is teasing out Hegelian dialectics; everything contains its antithesis, and the processes of growth and life are fueled by the irresolute contradictions that tear at us. The man of science finds comfort in mysticism. The healthy act of running brings deadly heart attack. There is laughter at a funeral. Death contains birth.
The plot kicks in ten years later. Anna (Nicole Kidman), still in mourning over her late husband, is now engaged to Joseph (Danny Huston). At a birthday dinner for Anna's mother Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), a child named Sean (Cameron Bright) intrudes on the celebration claiming to be Anna's late husband reincarnated. The rest of the runtime follows the fallout of this eerily plausible claim.
Director Jonathan Glazer maintains the stark beauty of the opening sequence throughout, leaning on some rich production design by Kevin Thompson. A formal engagement party is suffused with suffocating browns. The high society dishes, glassware, furniture are all pristine and in their perfect place. The dinosaur stickers on young Sean's wall are in the lovingly clumpy patterns that only a child would choose. The fullness of this physical world keeps the loopy premise from defeating us.
You see, not only does Sean want Anna to acknowledge that he is her late husband--he wants to steal her back from her fiancee. He wants to be her husband and lover and everything else that he once was, despite the fact that he is now occupying a ten year-old's body. Anna, for her part, finds herself unable to let go of her husband's ghost. So we have a film that spirals into pedophilia, first hinted at, then eventually outright discussed.
The craziest part is that the premise almost works for quite a long time. Bright's performance as Sean is both wise and inscrutable, and Glazer's directing manages to elevate tawdriness into an unflinching examination of a mind-melting situation. In many ways, I have to admire the film's boldness for committing fully to a premise that others would shy away from. This isn't the story about a child who wants to marry an adult, this is a meditation on the ways that lovers of the past cling to us, and the revelatory nature of rupture.
For at the center of everything is this small child's claim: I am your dead husband. This is all it takes to strip bare the pretenses that keep our characters afloat. From the moment Sean intrudes on that birthday party, shot to emphasize the whiplash of a normal evening interrupted, nothing can quite restabilize. We see this in the film's best sequence, which begins with Anna and Joseph confronting the boy in a hallway until he collapses from stress (the movie's best and only jump scare). Anna and Joseph then rush to the symphony, where an agonizingly long zoom in to Anna's face confronts us with a panic that cannot be tamped down. Glazer has the wherewithal to understand that Nicole Kidman should be given every opportunity to perform without interruption. The way we see her processing the unthinkable, with occasional whispers from her fiancee jolting her out of revery, is astonishing. We don't know exactly what she is thinking, yet we can project so much.
Another throughline of the film is projection, after all. When we meet Joseph, he is giving a speech to a roomful of people about how he had to pester Anna into dating and subsequently marrying him, as if persistence is a virtue. This is not an emotionally secure man, and the moment that his relationship with Anna is threatened, even by a child, his posture shifts into a sort of chest-puffed bravado. His fiancee's ex-husband could surely never be a sexual rival for him--he's either dead or a little boy, depending on what you believe. Nevertheless, this moment of rupture has given voice to his deepest looming insecurities, as we see in the film's most entertaining sequence, a private living room music performance that ends with Joseph initiating a physical fight with the boy. Now is as good a time as any to mention that Birth is sometimes an actively funny movie, despite its engagement with trauma and perversity. Much of the comedy is located in Lauren Bacall's dry-as-bone line readings; her character, Eleanor, provides a much needed counterweight to the delusion she senses building in the rest of her family.
The bizarre minefield ballet of Birth cannot sustain itself through its final act. A single plot contrivance collapses the film into the most literal version of itself. Any semblance of the allegorical, spiritual, or supernatural disappears. We are left only with the gross feeling that we were made to follow too far along the path of a perverted fantasy.
Maybe that deflation is part of the commentary. Regardless, we come to realize we have watched something far more trashy than it had seemed in the moment, and certainly much less mesmerizing. The plot takes the coward's way out, and the consequence is a film that we can now only appreciate for its pieces rather than its whole. Certainly there is still the meta-enjoyment of witnessing Kidman do her level best to justify all this, but one final beat of artful contradiction (tears at a wedding) is not enough to wash the bad taste out.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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