In the Cut Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 4th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
IN THE CUT
Directed by Jane Campion
Rated R, 118 minutes
The clown has always wanted to play Hamlet. Michael Jordan had to try baseball, opera singers can't resist the urge to do pop ballads, actors run for public office, and public officials try their hands at acting. Who can blame Meg Ryan for wanting to kick over the America's Sweetheart traces and play a little down-and-dirty sex? The fact is, she's pretty good, with the sex and with the character, and so is her costar, Mark Ruffalo. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our director.
Jane Campion ("The Piano") has always been drawn to the Freudian back-alleys of female sexuality, but in the past she's haunted a more refined type of alley. Here she's plunging into the slasher-thriller genre, and her instincts have gone all haywire. Her camera setups are self-consciously arty, her plot setups are self-consciously obvious, there are gaps in the editing and holes in the logic. There's language to bring a blush to the cheek of a staff sergeant; and of course there are buckets of blood.
Ryan plays Frannie Avery, an English teacher in a lower Manhattan inner-city high school. She's trying to interest her students in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", which is a stiff challenge. When they hear that only one woman dies in the book, the kids are scornful. "How many women would have to die for it to be a good book?" she asks, and after some reflection, a student answers "Three."
Frannie's passion is language. She jots down lines from the poetry-in-the-subways cards ("I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees"), and meets one of her students, a big African-American kid named Cornelius Webb (Sharrieff Pugh) in a bar to pump him for street slang (we learn the word "meeow", but not what it means.) During their session she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, a facility located down a dark staircase with an ominously closing door. In fact we can't be sure it's even down there. She never finds it. She finds instead a man getting oral sex from a woman with blue fingernails. She can't see his face in the shadows, but she can make out a tattoo on his wrist. He can see her face, though, if the reverse camera angle lighting is anything to go by, and she spends plenty of time standing there and watching.
The next day Blue Fingernails is dead - "disarticulated", in the catchy term employed by James Malloy (Ruffalo), the homicide detective assigned to the case. The word means to separate body parts at the joint, and the victim's head is not discovered in the same neighborhood as the victim's blue
fingernails.
He interviews Frannie, who offers no information, but sends out enough pheromones to prompt him to ask her out. She demurs, and waits to talk it over with her half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a dim, desperate creature who lives in a flea trap above a strip club. Pauline and Frannie both seem to have unerring bad instincts about men, but Frannie at least has learned not to act on hers right away. "Why don't you just think about sex?" she advises her sister, and we know what she means from some self-gratification we've seen her indulge in the night before. Pauline's advice is just the opposite: "Sleep with him," she says, "if only for the exercise."
So Frannie goes out with Malloy, and his line is not of the "what spring does to the cherry trees" variety, but it's colorful and to the point. I'm not sure about the police procedure in this. I don't know whether a cop investigating a serial homicide would ask out a potential witness on their first meeting. I'm not sure a cop and his partner would usher said young woman into their cruiser and then turn the air blue with their language while hardly paying her a scrap of notice. I'm not convinced that, after a night of torrid sex, he would leave her apartment just as she's getting ready to give him his first solid lead in the case, or that even a hardened homicide cop would be in the mood for phone sex right after cataloguing some disarticulated body parts in a blood-soaked laundromat. But it takes all kinds.
It's a brave performance by Ryan, who wears Jane Fonda's wig from "Klute" and nothing else in some pretty torrid scenes. Ruffalo too bares all; Campion's not the sort of director to spare the man what she asks of the woman. Both actors do a remarkable job of baring character as well, but the characters they're given are too amorphous to admit clean lines in the drawing.
Campion is an intelligent director, and she manages a few good moments, but she loses her way amongst the blood and shadows of the thriller genre. Cinematographer Dion Beebe gives her a lighting scheme out of "Seven", but the camera jiggles as if the whole thing were being shot on the downtown local. The screen is strewn with symbols, and irrelevant close-ups that claim to portend, but portend nothing. The pool of potential bad guys is small, and easily disarticulated, and the suspense peters out early.
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