In The Cut

Meg Ryan was Hollywood’s biggest rom-com star (her salary for her previous film, Kate & Leopold, was US$15m) when she took the lead in Jane Campion’s grisly thriller about a high school teacher, Frannie, who has an affair with a callous police detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a series of brutal murders that have taken place close to where she lives in NYC. Clearly the intention was to break out of her girl-next-door image (she followed it up with Against The Ropes, 2004 in which she played a female boxer). A critical and commercial failure (as was ATR) she was successful beyond her wildest dreams her career going into freefall, landing her in TV land where she has largely stayed ever since. Only Winona Ryder made a bigger hash of things.

That aside, as a top drawer production In The Cut is not altogether without merit although its mix of literary allusion, art-house stylings and Fincher-like grimness makes for an uneasy combination.  Based on a 1996 novel by Susanna Moore which in turn owes an acknowledged debt to Virginia Wool’s 1927 novel 'To The Lighthouse' one can imagine that it worked a lot better on the page than it does onscreen. The biggest drawback is trying to reconcile the highly subjective impression of events as seen from Frannie’s perspective (a technique which was central to Woolf’s novel and I assume Moore’s, which I have not read) and the requirements of the thriller genre. Indeed so interwoven are the former with the latter that it seems at times as if the whole thing is in fact nothing but Frannie’s dream, a nightmarish amalgam of the real and the unreal driven by her sexually-frustrated fevered imagination.

Campion, with the help of her cinematographer Dion Beebe summons up this disturbed and disturbing world impressively but so hermetic it is, events largely taking placed in a few dark, cramped and congested interiors with only a few daylight street scenes, that the whodunnit aspect seems like merely an armature on which to hang its exploration of the destructive power of the Id, the film never reconciling Frannie’s everyday life as a schoolteacher with her troubled psyche and the choices she makes, principally to do with men. Why she would take up with the crudely offhand Malloy remains a mystery throughout, except that her previous fling with a mentally-unhinged mature-aged med student (Kevin Bacon), an egregious red herring if ever there was one, is even more dubious. Her relationship with a young African-American student named Cornelius Webb (Sharrieff Pugh) who hands in a term paper embellished with blood stains that argues that real life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, was innocent, is also questionable not to mention another glaringly obvious red herring.

Ryan, in a role which executive producer Nicole Kidman was originally going to play is as effective as the script will let her be. Indeed she looks and acts more like Kidman than she does her familiar perky screen self. Jennifer Jason Leigh is well-cast as her flaky half-sister (who conveniently lives over a strip club) whilst Ruffalo carries off the role of the conflicted detective intrigued by Frannie’s flinty vulnerability.  

As an exploration of female sexuality In The Cut is not in the league of pioneering works such as Looking for Mr Goodbar,1977, or Klute, 1971. As a grisly spine chiller, Fincher does this sort of thing much better and few people, and especially not Meg Ryan fans, are going to thank Campion for this unsatisfying hybrid.

 

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