Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

I've admired Glazer's much later Under the Skin for some time now but it's taken me a long time to get round to Birth, despite encountering a number of enthusiastic advocates for the film. Maybe it's just because I'm reading Henry James at the moment but at times watching this almost felt like a Kubrick, if Kubrick had been into James rather than Arthur Schnitzler. (Which is not to say that it ever feels as if Glazer is trying to "do a Kubrick" - and yes, the connections might be a little tenuous: Shining-like corridors, Eyes Wide Shut-style rich New Yorkers, and the obvious Kidman connection. Whatever, that's what I thought while watching it, OK?) SPOILERS FOLLOW... Some people seem to have felt that the film's explanation is a cop-out, but I think that this mistakes what the film is about. We're meant, I think, to realise that our desire for a 10-year old boy to be a reincarnation of a dead man is as ridiculous as is Kidman's character's desire for this to be true - as she herself comes to realise (I love her self-mocking line reading of "I thought you were my dead husband"). But we, and she, also discover that realising this does absolutely nothing to dissolve the desire. It's also very important that the boy is not lying. So that I do think one could explore this film in terms of the fact that who we are and what we want must always be a social matter, must involve what other people think we are and want, along the lines that Robert Pippin explores in his book on Henry James (Henry James & Modern Moral Life) - the point is that when Sean says in his letter that his therapists have told him that "the good thing is that nothing really happened", this is precisely what is not the case. After just one viewing I'm not entirely sure that the film is quite the stone-cold masterpiece that its fans seem to think, but it's better than most of what's out there.