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Jane Campion takes her hacks
BY PETER KEOUGH
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In the Cut
Directed by Jane Campion. Written by Jane Campion and Susanna Moore based on Moore’s novel. With Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kevin Bacon, Sharrieff Pugh, and Nick Damici. A Sony Pictures release (118 minutes). At the Fenway and the Kendall Square and in the suburbs.
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In Jane Campion’s films, the word is often made flesh, the abstract becomes bloodily literal. In her greatest film, The Piano, Holly Hunter’s mute mail-order bride in the wilderness must communicate her identity and her desire through the title instrument and through the "lessons" she gives to Harvey Keitel’s sensitive brute. She pays for her presumption by sacrificing a body part to patriarchal righteousness, as do the victims in Campion’s latest, an adaptation of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut and the director’s ingenious and infuriating first venture into the macho serial-killer genre. Neither Campion nor the genre will be quite the same again — not to mention Meg Ryan’s image. As Frannie, an English teacher in Manhattan, Ryan has never been less glamorous or more erotically open; she resembles a drabbed-down version of Jane Fonda’s Bree in Alan Pakula’s Klute. Frannie’s job seems to consist of jotting down scraps of language — the latest slang and the greatest hits of literature. Most of the latter are supplied by public-service ads on the bus; the former arrive via her disturbed but brilliant inner-city student Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh), who’s writing a paper about the innocence of John Wayne Gacy. Frannie takes Cornelius for drinks at a local dive, and emboldened by this walk on the wild side, she descends into the joint’s basement, where she watches a guy with a tattoo’d hand get a blow job. Next thing you know, the cops are interrogating her about a woman’s severed head that’s been found in her garden. It seems a killer is at work, "marrying" his female victims with a wedding ring before, as one cop puts it, "disarticulating" them. That’s the bad cop, Detective Rodriguez (Nick Damici). The good cop, Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo with a feral moustache), talks a rough game but claims to know about other varieties of oral satisfaction. Encouraged by her slumming half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh making the most of a schematic role), who gives her a makeover with some of her slutty clothes, Frannie takes up Malloy’s challenge. So he becomes the Harvey Keitel to her Holly Hunter, and they begin a ritualistic, raunchy, dangerous liaison. Foolhardy, in fact, especially after Frannie gets assaulted by a masked man in an alley and more disarticulated body parts turn up in the neighborhood. As a suspense thriller, In the Cut is pretty disarticulated itself. The closest it gets to Hitchcock is the recurrence of "Whatever Will Be, Will Be," from The Man Who Knew Too Much, on the soundtrack, though a repeated silent-movie-style fantasy about Frannie’s father proposing to her mother (damn that patriarchy!) is as heavy-handed and ill-considered as the Salvador Dalí dream sequence in Spellbound (or the talking beans in Portrait of a Lady). The problem isn’t a shortage of suspects — there’s Cornelius, Malloy, and a former boyfriend played by Kevin Bacon in a cameo of studied weirdness, among others. There’s just no suspense. Both Ryan and Campion seem to be sleepwalking in an intriguing but abstract dream, searching for a key to the mystery of language, libido, gender, power, and identity. Every once in a while, they’re jolted awake — say, by a dryer full of severed limbs and oozing organs (a nod, perhaps, to the similarly problematic Clint Eastwood vehicle Tightrope) — and they remember that they have a story they’re supposed to be telling. But more power to them. Ryan shows guts and depth when she doesn’t seem anæsthetized. It’s a brave role and not self-consciously so, and worthwhile if for no other reason than that it will be impossible to imagine her again in another movie with Tom Hanks. As for Campion, lately the eccentricity and the flights of fancy that buoyed her earlier films have stultified into mannerism. Here, that dark vivacity emerges again with the kind of insouciant, surreal flair that’s bound to annoy as much as it amuses. (I personally liked Rodriguez’s squirt gun but got a little weary with the phallic references to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.) No doubt the film and Campion will be reviled by those who like their serial-killer movies brain-dead as well bloody and who prefer the empty, anal dazzle of Quentin Tarantino’s latest to the troubling ambiguities of her experiment. In the Cut is a mess, but its parts are greater than the whole.
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