(out of four)
By David N. Butterworth
Since their split exactly one year ago, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have
gone their wildly separate ways both on- and off-screen especially (as far as
their careers are concerned) in terms of work rate and exposure.
Tom hasn’t had much to say for himself (a leading role in the recent Vanilla
Sky excepted) yet Nicole has impressed in The Others (earning a
Golden Globe nomination), Moulin Rouge (winning a Golden Globe in the “Best
Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy” category),
and now Birthday Girl, in which the we-forget-she’s Australian actress
turns in yet another strong performance as a Russian mail-order bride with Meryl
Streep accents.
Actually, that’s a Russian Internet-order bride, since Kidman’s character
is picked up off the web by a mild-mannered bank clerk through a permanent
matchmaking service known as “From Russia With Love” (here’s hoping the
folks at MGM/Danjaq don’t do a Goldmember and start making more
zero-tolerance fuss about the sanctity of the James Bond franchise). Ben Chaplin
(IMDb trivia note: is not related to Charles Chaplin!) plays the teller,
John Buckingham, and is well cast as “the world’s greatest pillock” once
it becomes clear that Nadia (Kidman) is not all she appears to be (and I don’t
simply mean the fact that she smokes a lot, vomits a lot, and can’t speak a
word of English, none of which she bothered to mention in her online bio).
Anyway, girls are never what they seem when they appear
in the credits with a slash between their name(s).
Shortly after her arrival in the quaint English town of St. Albans,
Nadia/Sofia’s “cousins” (played by Brotherhood of the Wolf’s
Vincent Cassel and Amélie’s Mathieu Kassovitz) show up to celebrate
Nadia’s birthday (hence the title) and things get mighty hairy mighty quickly.
What’s intriguing about Birthday Girl is that it’s not your stock
Hollywood product. This is no doubt a direct result of the fact that British
director Jez Butterworth (no relation) draws upon the likes of Preston Sturges
and Billy Wilder for his inspiration and not, say, Quentin Tarantino (with whom
Butterworth was compared on the strength of his violent, award-winning 1995 play
Mojo). No, Birthday Girl is a funny, sexy, tense, and generally
well-plotted romantic thriller, never exactly going where you think it might,
always serving up something a little bit out of the ordinary...and you don’t
have to dig too deeply to find those afore-referenced directorial influences.
Credit should undoubtedly be bestowed upon the entire Butterworth clan (who
themselves grew up in St. Albans it turns out) and not just Jez (short for
Jeremy), since brother Tom co-wrote the film and brother Steve produced it (a
fourth brother, John Henry, helped pen Jez’s next work-in-progress while their
sister, a registrar at a London drama school, remains cinematically unattached).
In addition to Kidman’s artful, centered performance, Birthday Girl
conjures up several kinky bondage scenarios (Nadia discovers John’s hidden
stash of whack mags and tries to make it up to him), some killer twists and
turns, and a musical score punctuated by (believe it or not) Croatian hip-hop!
It’s a true Birthday’ surprise.
