Of the Survivors
Enduring Love, adapted from Ian McEwan's novel, starts with a couple picnicking in a meadow. Director Michell favors static longshots that reduce lovers Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) to specks. Then, madness: a hot air balloon falls from the sky, trailed by brave souls trying to halt disaster. They cling to the balloon's dangling ropes-human ballast-but their efforts fail and a man dies. Michell captures the frenzy in handheld shots from disorienting angles. The jagged editing and hard-cut sound cues evoke breaking news coverage.
Birth's opening displays equal confidence but more imagination. The first image is a seemingly airborne tracking shot of a man jogging a snowy Central Park footpath-an image that evokes, but does not merely duplicate, the opening helicopter shots from Kubrick's The Shining. (The cinematographer is the great Harris Savides, who shot Gus Van Sant's Elephant and Gerry.) Birth's opening shot accumulates hypnotic force by refusing to cut and by pouring on Alexandre Desplat's intricate score, which includes, among other instruments, bells and chimes, a forceful string section, a piano and a synthesized rhythm track that suggests an anxious heartbeat.
Subsequent images are just as unsettling. A shot from underneath a bridge zooms back until the bridge forms a proscenium arch around the snowy landscape and the jogger enters and collapses. But a subsequent close-up of the man is brief and dimly lit. A climactic slow zoom-out from the death site is accompanied, in Desplat's score, by the insistent "ping" of a triangle (paging John Donne). Then Glazer cuts to a blurry handheld shot of a baby's birth (Kubrick, meet Stan Brakhage).
The opening of Enduring Love probably has more than 100 shots; the opening of Birth has just five. The former is effective but a bit textbook. Birth's opening is superior because it's so exact yet mysterious. The difference between these two openings, and these two movies, is the difference between craft and art, between prose that explains itself and poetry that doesn't.
The first quarter of Enduring Love suggests we're about to see a nuanced, subjective drama about a disaster survivor losing control of his life. (Peter Weir's flawed but powerful Fearless went this route.) A fellow witness to terror, the disheveled loner Jed Parry (Rhys Ifans) believes the accident bonded him to Joe. Socially inept and deeply religious, Jed at first seems a hapless, sensitive cousin of Max Cady in Scorsese's Cape Fear remake-a goofy wraith punishing upper-middle-class white folks for their sins.
Because Joe and Claire have done nothing to merit Jed's increasingly scary attentions, the plotline makes Enduring Love seem like a stalker picture posing as an arthouse-ready existential wallow (rather like In the Bedroom, which could have been retitled John Cheever's Death Wish). Enduring Love could have said useful things about the false intimacy conjured by chaos, but it mostly avoids the topic. It also loses interest in the question of how much responsibility Joe bears for his fellow rescuer's death. The film's inability to focus hobbles strong lead performances from Ifans (who invests what might have been just another unhinged role with ragged warmth) and from Craig and Morton as supposedly rational people whose love is crushed by fate.
Michell and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos aim for a documentary-like flavor, shooting handheld with long lenses and often framing the characters within doorframes, windows, hallways and blurred-out foreground objects. This, too, seems counterproductive. Shouldn't a film fixated on life's unknowables adopt a less earthbound style? For inspiration, Michell need only have looked at his own Notting Hill, a pleasant but unremarkable picture with one great sequence: an uncut, nearly four-minute tracking shot of Hugh Grant walking through his neighborhood as the seasons change around him.
While nothing in Enduring Love rises to that level of invention, nearly every scene in Birth exceeds it. Second-time feature filmmaker Glazer (Sexy Beast) isn't yet a great auteur, but he has an artist's love of risk. He never frames a shot or makes a cut exactly as you expected. He and Savides cherry-pick from the best of Kubrick, not just in The Shining but in Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon and Paths of Glory: the long tracking shots and slow zooms; the warm, hard light that bathes the film's pricey interiors, simultaneously suggesting wombs and jail cells; the all-or-nothing soundtrack, which either dominates and shapes the rhythms of a sequence or else shuts up and lets actors and ambient noises do the work. (Besides Desplat's consistently amazing score, Glazer also makes smart use of Richard Wagner.)
But Birth isn't a mere homage. Glazer is aiming to merge psychological thriller and spiritual speculation to make a ghost story with no ghosts. Minute for minute, he doesn't entirely succeed (some scenes are too truncated, others too long; some plot points are flubbed, others overexplained; sometimes the score is a bit much). But these flaws seem minor. Birth is an elegant, serious, elliptical drama that draws on other great films-including The Innocents, Rosemary's Baby and Red-yet summons its own feelings, its own stubborn magic.
The acting is hit or miss. As the heroine's new fiancee-the man she's being warned against marrying-Danny Huston seems too touchy and brooding, too potentially villainous, and a slow zoom into his face as he gazes through a window is melodramatic. (It screams, "Bad guy!") Lauren Bacall is note-perfect as the heroine's mom, a sardonic protector. As grief-stricken Anna, Nicole Kidman gives a solid but unimaginative lead performance, nowhere near as fierce and direct as her work in The Others and Eyes Wide Shut. But the movie is so inventive that it minimizes this central piece of miscasting (and to be fair, a big-budget film this peculiar could probably not have been made without somebody like Kidman in the lead).
As the 10-year-old who claims to be Anna's late husband, Sean, baby-faced Cameron Bright proves a natural camera subject and future star; this is the most controlled, intelligent lead performance by a young actor since Haley Joel Osment in A.I. The two films deserve comparison: Both juxtapose adult, sexualized love and the love between a mother and child. Birth deliberately and playfully conflates the two, but more seriously and tastefully than you've heard. The much discussed bathtub scene, which finds Sean doffing his clothes and joining Anna in the water, has been distorted by literal-minded viewers and the scandal-seeking entertainment press. It's one of the most emotionally complex scenes in any American film this year. Sensual because it involves actors in a bathtub; chaste because of the modest framing and the physical distance between Anna and Sean. Haunting because it creates a cinematic correlative for the forces that separate them.
It's also one of many scenes in Birth that unbalance us by touching on primal emotions while refusing to tell us what to think and feel. There is much evidence in Birth to suggest that the boy is not who he claims to be, but when you think about the film later, you realize he also knew things an impostor probably could not have known. Sean's climactic decision, which reverses the film's narrative momentum, could be a gesture of defeat and exposure or an act of almost unfathomable generosity, depending on how one interprets his character. The ending might be depressing or hopeful; either way, it's the right ending.
Birth is open to interpretation, and in that aspect alone, it feels more like a European movie than an American studio picture. This impression may be rooted in the script, which was cowritten by Jean-Claude Carrière, who penned Belle De Jour, The Return Of Martin Guerre and other dramas built around identity, impersonation, transformation and leaps of faith. Carrière's scripts often suggest that we are who we decide to be, and who others want us to be; it is inevitable and welcome that so many movies based on his work would adopt an inquisitive, open-ended strategy. Glazer's film is flawed, but its intelligence, empathy and openness make more superficially perfect films seem small. It feels incomplete in a good way; it finishes itself in the mind, where dreams are born.