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How do you explain a movie likeBirth?
A movie so peculiar, so insistent about its own curiosities.
The scene is warm, joyful, monied, and honeyed.
And then a 10-year-old boy walks through the door and it all collapses.
First the boy asks to speak to Anna, alone.
He tells her that hes Sean, her dead husband, the first scenes jogger.
The boy asks her not to marry Joseph.
She sends him home to his mother (Im not your stupid son anymore, he tells her).
She laughs it off.
But he leaves Anna notes, he calls the apartment, he shows up again.
Hes even-tempered but firm: ImSean.
Birthis a thriller, or a drama, or in its own category of oddball wonder.
I honestly cannot pinpoint its appeal: Nicole Kidman, in every scene, is deliriously uncomfortable.
Alexandre Desplats piano score pitter-patters over every emotional wound.
And yet … and yet!
I cannot get enough of this movie, its disquiet, its discomfort.
And even if we could explain them, who would listen?
Maybe this kid really is her husband, or some version of him.
Maybe she owes it to herself to find out.
Loss and grief are enigmas.
ThisBirthline is none of the above.
The Bacall line is a master class in snobbish indignation.
This boy is a child.
If mysteries happen, they happen toother people, nothereon theUpper East Side.
I mean, lets be serious: Danny Huston is in this movie.
The emotionally compromised daughter and her sternly disproving mother is well-trod narrative territory.
It helps, of course, that its Bacall, with herfamously deadpan voiceand its depth.
Hows Mr. Reincarnation enjoying his cake?
I can only aspire to this level of elegant, flippant displeasure.
Anyway, its election week.
Im anxious all the time.Birthfloats on the tender suggestion that one womans suffering might end.
Hows Mr. Reincarnation enjoying his cake?
grunts someone who knows better.
