"Birth"

Nicole Kidman stars as a woman entranced by a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her late husband. So just how steamy is that scene where Kidman and the kid take a bath together?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 29, 2004 | A perennial favorite in moviedom, the concept of love that extends beyond the grave is supposed to be deeply romantic. But ideally, shouldn't dead people mind their own business, instead of coming back to announce to the bereaved, "Just thought I'd check in, see how you're doing, and by the way, I'll love you forever -- feel better now?"

Setups like these usually mean we're headed for the zombie zone of movies in which a valuable and necessary lesson is about to be imparted -- "Life is for the living!" pretty much sums it up. The ghost, of course, isn't really a ghost at all, but a symbol of the bereaved's inability to let go and get on with things. And the ghost's love isn't love at all, but a screenwriter's construct. Ah, romance!

Still, there's a market for this sort of thing, and Jonathan Glazer's "Birth" is the latest to slither out of the canal. "Birth" is a little like the '80s crowd-pleaser "Ghost," but way artier. Nicole Kidman plays Anna, a young woman who, 10 years after suddenly losing her husband, reluctantly agrees to marry Joseph (Danny Huston), the nondescript, vaguely menacing suitor who has been poking her in the ribs for years, even as he's maintained an air of polite patience with his little filly's unabating grief. We know it's a mismatch, because we see Anna and Joseph making love (missionary position, natch), and we catch the glazed, detached "What is this guy doing on top of me?" look in Anna's eyes as Joseph dutifully grinds away.

But Anna's life is about to change -- again -- when a 10-year-old boy barges into a birthday party for her mother (the salty Lauren Bacall, as unlikely a mom for the ethereal Kidman as you could possibly cast) and announces that he's Sean, Anna's dead husband. This grade-school spudling gravely tells her not to marry Joseph, a dictum he reasserts by sending her little notes written in kiddie handwriting. She, and Joseph, try to make him go away, but he won't -- he repeatedly shows up, making bullying declarations like, "I love Anna, and nothing is going to change that. That's forever."

But this little, living Sean knows many intimate facts about big, dead Sean, and about Anna, as well -- things that only big, dead Sean could really know. And so Anna begins to wonder if, just maybe, this little Sean really is big Sean. Her doubts puzzle and anger those around her, particularly Joseph, who, at one point, scrambles over a baby grand piano to -- get this -- spank the disruptive little squirt.

There's a twist in "Birth," an implausible one. But it's all intentionally implausible. The fact that "Birth" doesn't make a whole lot of sense isn't its major flaw: Logic is overrated in movies. When a movie makes emotional sense, it doesn't necessarily need the other kind. But "Birth" is the kind of movie that keeps alerting you to its resonant emotional undertow without actually having one. It's completely different in tone and style from Glazer's first picture, 2001's "Sexy Beast" -- it has none of that movie's playfulness or crafty intelligence.

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