The Rabbit Hole of Reincarnation - BIRTH (2004)

"Controversial" is one of the most egregiously thrown-around adjectives in all the arts, mostly ensuring a rubbernecker success among films that may or may not have gotten any of that fame without having the label attached to its intentional or word-of-mouth press.  The usual track for controversial movies boils down to middling theatrical runs followed by extended video shelf lives, such as with Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (which has an impressively inflated out-of-print Amazon price tag).  Some movies are marketed as controversial up front, like The Libertine, and manufacturing controversy often lobs the film into the dustbin of history.  However, it's rare in America for a film to be called controversial before its release, get a severely stunted theatrical run, and piddle away on video, never to be spoken of again.  Birth is one of the most unjust of these cases, as the blasting it received before and upon its release seemed to take its context from what they thought the film was about rather than its actual content.  For those who actually gave it a shot, Birth was, and still is, a hypnotizing, highly stylized and deeply engrossing psychological mystery, exploring how sophisticated adults deal with a seemingly supernatural occurrence, blowing open how they view themselves and the world in the process.

It opens like this -

- an audaciously long shot of a man, Sean, running after giving a speech on the unlikeliness of the afterlife and reincarnation, set to Alexandre Desplat's haunting, magical score, that ends with him having a heart attack under a bridge.  Simultaneously, a child is born.  Ten years later, Sean's wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) is celebrating her engagement to Joseph (Danny Huston), with her old friends Clara (Anne Heche) and her husband Clifford (Peter Stormare) in attendance.  Clara leaves the party, located at Anna's swank Central Park apartment, to worriedly bury a small box in the park - and a young boy named Sean (Cameron Bright), who was hanging out in the lobby, sees her.  The next morning, Sean wakes up in a confused state, and later that day he sneaks into Anna's birthday party despite seemingly having no relation to her.  She requests to see Anna, much to the amusement of Anna and her family, and he says that she's his wife.  She jokes along, but soon realizes that he is dead serious - he claims to be Sean, her husband.  Anna sends him away, assuming he was just goofing with her.  However, he writes her a note and leaves it with the doorman at her apartment building.  She shows it to Joseph and her family, including her mother Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), and they decide that he's just being a weird kid.  That night, Joseph calls the doorman to find out who Sean is, when Sean himself answers the phone, as he was hanging out in the lobby.  His father (Ted Levine) is tutoring somebody in the building, and Joseph takes him to his father to confront him about the situation.  The father demands that Sean leave Anna alone, but he refuses.  Anna and Joseph are getting ready to leave for the opera, and as they walk away Sean falls to his knees in despair.  This makes way for the other astonishing long shot of the film, and the turning point of the plot and Anna's willingness to go down the rabbit hole:

While that setup might have paved the way for something melodramatic and contrived in another movie, Birth keeps us eveloped and guessing while riding a river of elegant restraint.  The director, Jonathan Glazer, is a veteran of music videos and commercials, and his previous film, Sexy Beast (starring Ray Winstone and an utterly terrifying Ben Kingsley), was a fantastic, highly stylized study of a retired mobster's re-descent into crime and its ugly results.  The visuals in Birth are deeply drawn and engrossing, bringing out the spare elegance of wealthy, old-style New York in Winter.  Shots are mostly static and the framing is impeccable, letting the psychology of the situation come to the fore.  Anna's dining room walls are overbearingly green, an ode to the Fauvist art movement around the turn of the century and one of a number of shots well-guidedly inspired by painting.  The acting is perfect, with Anna and the other adults playing off the static photography with roiling confusion, unease and anger, the different reactions interacting beautifully.  Cameron Bright never had the most range as a child actor, but his stone-faced, wise-beyond-his-years delivery gives a mysterious and magnetic presence to his character and his claims.  The music, Alexandre Desplat's sort-of breakout, is the very definition of hypnotic beauty, and it's one of the few soundtrack albums I own (now out of print and going for mucho bucks ;)).  The movie's greatest strength is its ability to reason with an impossible idea with adult logic and come to a stalemate, and a couple of twists make sure that nothing is as it seems and a real resolution may be impossible, a factor which makes the movie endlessly rewatchable.


As per the "controversial" tag - the rumors surrounding the movie before its release questioned whether or not the specter of pedophilia would rear its ugly head.  The filmmakers do bring it up, as a smart, compelling psychodrama would with the subject matter, but it's dealt with in the most tasteful possible way, making the Moral Majority worryworts seem idiotic kneejerkers, which they were.  Unfortunately, this didn't save the movie from getting pulled less than a week into its theatrical run.  The DVD is still around, but it hasn't made much impact, and the whole thing may be why Glazer didn't make another movie until 2013, Under the Skin.  It makes me especially angry, not just because his first two movies are utterly fantastic, but because he had a unique cinematic voice and should be allowed to make as many movies as he sees fit.  Imagine how worse off the film world would be if Paul Thomas Anderson's career got snuffed after Boogie Nights because of the shot of Dirk Diggler's fake penis at the end.  Anyways, you shouldn't give two craps about the moral guardians who pressured the film out of release - they obviously hadn't seen the movie and shouldn't have had any power over distributors in the first place.  Birth is a fascinating and perfectly crafted psychological mystery that deserves all the praise it can get - so give it a spin and praise as you will.

~PNK