Thursday, October 30, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Victim of love

Meg bares all in Jane Campion's mediocre thriller In the Cut

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Sooner or later, successful actors best known for weightless comedies and romantic fluff will attempt The Serious Role, the one intended to subvert a Hollywood lite image and prompt critics to preface their names with the term "unrecognizable." For a man, this is best accomplished by pretending to be mentally challenged (Tom Hanks, Cuba Gooding, Jr.). But for a woman, seriousness comes at a much higher price, demanding she cast aside not only makeup and highlighting but even, in extreme cases, modesty itself.

For Meg Ryan, In the Cut is her stab at credibility, and the best thing that can be said about the film--aside from the stunningly low-life performance of co-star Mark Ruffalo--is that she gives her all. As Frannie, an inner-city teacher and sometime writer, Ryan wears greasy brown hair and a permanently gob-smacked expression. She sheds her clothes willingly and poses unattractively. More, she behaves with the utter irrationality that the script (by director Jane Campion and novelist Susanna Moore) demands. That the film lets her down in every conceivable way is not her fault.

In the Cut is a mediocre erotic thriller straining for high art. Using a standard woman-in-jeopardy scenario, the movie gives us a serial killer who could be any one--or none--of the unstable males in Frannie's life. There's Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), a muscled and volatile student who's helping her compile a glossary of African American slang; ex-lover John (Kevin Bacon), who leaves obsessive phone messages and accosts her in coffee shops wearing scrubs and a two-day stubble. And then there's Malloy (Ruffalo), the cop investigating the case who seems to turn Frannie on precisely because she believes he's a murderer.

Campion's films have always leaned heavily on their female leads, women at odds with the world and fighting for permission to be themselves. Though Ryan is no Holly Hunter (The Piano), she does what she can to give Frannie agency. But there's something uncomfortably sadistic about the way Campion treats her here: Yes, Ryan may lack dramatic range, but the script gives her none to play. And yes, she may spend half the film wandering around like the dazed survivor of a car wreck, but that's the way Campion sets her up. Childlike and sexually repressed, Frannie is the ultimate victim, attracted to everything she fears and preferring fantasy to an actual relationship (her favorite song is "Just My Imagination"). Pushing her to a state of hyper-vulnerability, Campion dresses Frannie to emphasize Ryan's natural thinness and impossibly skinny legs, which often seem incapable of supporting her. When Frannie's not cowering, she's stumbling.

As Frannie's equally messed-up half-sister Pauline, Jennifer Jason Leigh is extremely touching, the affection between them the only real emotion in the entire movie. But with contrived symbolism--a desolate bride on a railway platform, a tiny silver baby lost from a charm bracelet--Campion keeps insisting these women have no hope of safety or a "normal" life. Whose fault is that? Their New York is a city washed in the colors of blood and steel and populated entirely by scum. Yet Pauline's choice of residence is an apartment directly above a chaotic brothel, her romantic obsession a married man who treats her like trash. When Frannie's wallet is stolen, she doesn't even have the sense to change her locks. Then, when Malloy asks her out, it's to a grimy bar where he crudely explains his impressive lingual abilities before the first drink. She hurries home to masturbate. Is Frannie in love with abuse? Or is Campion?
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