From Russia Without Love

Nearly everything about Birthday Girl, a black comedy from British director Jez Butterworth, is depressingly mediocre, but it's generating big buzz because of Nicole Kidman's star turn as a Russian mail-order bride (no joke) named Nadia. Not surprisingly, Kidman's gravity as an actress and a celebrity is distracting; her performance is at once skillful and entirely unconvincing.

Robbed of her native language, Kidman spends a large part of the movie in total silence--it's a good opportunity to flex her acting chops, but I found it impossible to get past Kidman's star presence, which both renders her role completely implausible and throws the entire movie off balance. Everything that surrounds her pales so dramatically in comparison that it feels like she's sucking the life out of every scene.

The plot, for what it's worth, has Nadia shipped to England for a lonely banker (Ben Chaplin) who, oddly, seems terrified of having sex with her simply because she won't speak English. He soon finds himself immersed in a fly-by-night scam involving two of her Russian comrades (Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz), and the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold syndrome sets in with predictable results and a barely adequate emotional payoff.

Butterworth demonstrates almost complete ineptitude with his material: the movie is a mess, with lots of odd, interjecting touches thrown in that completely disrupt any sense of narrative structure. Comic setups are labored and poorly timed, and a series of big shocks mid-plot are so deliberately orchestrated that you'll see them coming from a mile away.

Butterworth's portrayal of Russians, incidentally, is a blazingly anti-PC throwback to the obscene caricatures of inept, boorish, vodka-swilling con men we've come to expect from James Bond films. Even more obtuse are the banker's sadomasochistic fantasies (not to mention a few hints of misogyny among the males), which lend a disturbing undertone to the proceedings--especially when he and Kidman literally start to beat each other senseless. Maybe Butterworth knew where he was going with all this, but I can't see what the point is or why anyone would care.