"She doesn't do anything to make herself attractive," Kathleen Ann Quinlan, in foil against a serial poisoner
Jane Campion aims for piercing through feminine pain in her 2003 In the Cut, a film which miscasts Meg Ryan as a poet teacher and does an abominable disservice to my favorite novel. Writers tend to have detached personalities, but Meg Ryan’s teacher is a swishing slut, pale and effervescent in comparison to her younger supporting lead in Flesh and Bone, taken aback by the metropolitan brutality in which she deigns to thrive, in a narrative with an otherwise predictable bait and switch, with Ruffalo’s edginess lacking the requisite ambiguity for suspense. Why Bacon was cast as the jilted boyfriend is beyond this blogger’s ability to enter into, in reference to Nicole Kidman’s verve as the producer; he may represent a generalized post-9/11 anxiety, in addition to serving as the typical supporting character for misdirected suspicion, but the repugnant turgid aspect to his role doesn’t quite ratchet up the audience sympathy for the imperiled heroine. Damici spoils everything as the Detective Richie long gone into section 8 territory, more meatball than methodical predator.
Despite these posterior impediments, Campion does manage to break past the battery of inured defenses. The lack of a musical score concentrates the sickening stench of the body butchery which hypersexualizes Ruffalo’s Malloy for Ryan’s Avery. Kidman’s iciness cues the damsel backstory, with a nod to the snow white feline sauntering along the alleyway, and Ruffalo cannot save the girl because the girl offered the recognition of the tattoo she recognized to the wrong player. Homage to Doris Day’s Que Sera, as the title track, sears the breasts of every woman who necessarily has to be disappointed with patriarchal dominance, settling for ineffectual decency.
This is an incontrovertibly modern movie, understating drama for a stark view of new century difference, a template perhaps not consciously but certainly genetically related to the 2009 Personal Effects. Hollander may have intended this ensemble view of murder victims to be a marquee vehicle for Ashton Kutchner, but the bad aftertaste Vancouver leaves in our mouths is a sad testament to the fact that studio executives insist audiences have to accept mediocre actors as celebrities. Kutchner doesn’t have Charlie Sheen’s ability to make the camera love him, and the screenplay relegates the disabled to indigestible burdens: the honorable retarded man a scapegoated casualty due to the need to assign blame, a fatherless deaf boy indulging in homicidal impulses to salve his losses. Kutchner may be the duty driven protector, but his cruelty surpasses boundaries, both to the retarded suspect, who he calls “a man like that,” and to his ostensible lover’s deaf son, with whom he deliberately maintains fences. Hollander takes so many shots of the megabird costume he might have well marketed this flick to Henson’s muppet market. Being well made doesn’t always translate into being responsible for your end product, which may or may not be the problem with Ben Carson’s candidacy. I am not the first person to suspect the minority with miracle hands might be gaming the nominating process.
In USA today he calls the racism of the Charleston shooter a disease, and then turns around and associates Sunni extremism with rabies. I don’t necessarily disagree with his rhetoric there, but do acknowledge the sand pit in which he’s trapped himself. Racism is not a disease. It may corrode, and with pronounced virulence, may be symptomatic of physiological decline, but in and of itself, prejudice is not equivalent to illness. To his credit, and despite the mote in my eye, as it stands, he is the only GOP candidate who fascinates me as a journalist in pursuit of a subject, the only one who ignites any semblance of a motivation, but surgeons aren’t generally inclined to be tea party absolutists, as those who administer the brutality of the medical model the disabled have to live, and if Carson isn’t the victim of conflicting mental impulses in his own right, perhaps he is running in the top tier so he can die a black millionaire. Powell did the same thing after he left the Bush administration, but kept it within the confines of accepted parameters. Carson is not, and that is fine, but it may also indicate the death of the American two party system. The lunatic fringe is catering to a hunger for flamboyance, and the democratic left, even if Hillary Clinton prevails, is weak. If Xi Jinping sucks this into his vacuum cleaner, like any good opportunist, I’ll join in with the violinists. With some thinking, I may wedge in a more impassioned post to the doctor later. A long post like this may attest to a spastic with no life, but a power chair turned torture chamber makes a poverty sunken mattress a haven of resignation, with which both Hollander and Campion conclude their problematic dramas.
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