In the Cut (2003)

2 years ago

In the Cut (2003)

AMERICA’S SWEETHEART NO MORE

by Letitia Trent

It’s hard to imagine a movie less like a “Meg Ryan Movie” than Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003). The film is a bizarre mishmash of thriller, cerebral meditation on alienation, feminist examination of sex, and slasher movie. Unfortunately, this combination doesn’t make for a particularly coherent whole - but the most interesting thing about it is Ryan’s attempt at destroying the image of herself that she so actively created throughout the 90’s. When you watch In the Cut, it’s hard to concentrate on anything but Meg Ryan dismantling Meg Ryan.

Ryan plays Frannie, a raspy-voiced poet and college professor who lives an isolated and uneventful life. She teaches college English, but we don’t see her in the classroom very often. In one of the few classroom scenes, when Frannie assigns “To the Lighthouse”, a student comments that “nothing happens” because “only one lady dies” in the book. “How many ladies have to die before it’s a good book?” she asks. This is the most lighthearted scene in the movie, which should give you a sense of the overall tone Campion (The Piano)is going for. Although the movie is dark, it isn’t at all melodramatic like Ryan’s previous attempt at drama, When a Man Loves a Woman. It’s all sharp edges and unsentimentality, and very few of the characters are loveable.

Frannie is introspective, somewhat sour, and bears no traces of the adorable and hyper-articulate characters Ryan famously played in When Harry Met Sally or Sleepless in Seattle. She even changes herself physically—her voice is lower, her hair darker and more severely cut, her body more exposed than in previous movies. She’s the anti-Sally. Remember that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Ryan pretends to have an orgasm at a cafe? Well, she also pretends to have orgasms in this movie, though these pretend orgasms are dirtied up and un-cute and usually involve Frannie alone, face-down on the bed in her tiny apartment. Frannie’s only close friend seems to be her half-sister, played with her usual slow-talking sexiness by Jennifer Jason Leigh, an actress so amorphous and unfocused that I see her as oozing through scenes instead of walking through them.

The only other significant relationship Frannie has is with her creepy ex-boyfriend, the oddly-cast Kevin Bacon, who shows up from time to time to threaten and plead with her to take him back and serve as a red-herring in the creaky thriller plot that Campion halfheartedly tries to make happen.

In the Cut is a curiously silent movie, particularly since it focuses on a character who is supposed to love literature, but Ryan does a good job of playing a poet—a person obsessed by words though not particularly interested in deploying them in a way that expresses her actual desires or thoughts. Her motivations remain unclear throughout the movie, though that seems to be part of her character: Frannie doesn’t seem to be a creature of logic. Unlike in Ryan’s previous movies, where the girl is clearly looking for the exactly right man to make her life complete, this girl seems to be looking for a series of dangerous experiences.

The romantic lead in this film, if that’s what you could call him, is Mark Ruffalo, a brutal but sexually adept cop who Frannie first encounters after she finds a severed body part in her yard. When he tells her that there is a serial killer on the loose who has been de-articulating women, Frannie repeats the word back dreamily, as though he has said something sweet. As the movie progresses, and bodies pile up, Frannie begins to suspect that Ruffalo himself is the killer, possibly because of his highly suspect mustache. She continues a sexual relationship with him anyway—not despite her fears, but because of them. Ruffalo is attractive because he’s dangerous. Not just dangerous in a heart-break kind of way, but dangerous in a he-might-de-articulate-you kind of way, which is farther into bad-boy territory than most women want to go.

Like the character of Frannie herself, the film is both startling and unfocused. Campion’s colors are bright and hyper-saturated, and the camera often goes in and out of focus in the middle of a scene, perhaps to indicate how tenuous Frannie’s connection to the world really is. This dreaminess contrasts strangely with the frank sex and gore. Tonally, the movie is a mess. But maybe that’s the point—at no point do you know what the hell you are watching. This quality undercuts what seems to be a feminist movie (if such a thing can exist), but it’s hard to know exactly what one would want from the heroine of this movie.

If you watch interviews from around the time Ryan made this movie, particularly her BBC interview with Michael Parkinson, she visibly bristles at questions about sex, identity, romance, and her career change. She says that romance is a lie, sex is beautiful, and that years before, she wouldn’t have been able to make the film. It’s clear she’s uncomfortable with the perceived break between the old Meg Ryan and the new one, and it’s not hard to understand why. Why would Meg Ryan, America’s sweetheart, purveyor of iconic romantic-comedy characters, modern women entangled in modern versions of romantic love, want to destroy the image that made her famous? The answer is clear—Meg Ryan isn’t the Meg Ryan of movies, and years of being that sweet blonde, that bubbly, beautiful, and accessible girl probably began to feel like a straightjacket. Playing Frannie was a fuck you to romance, sweetness, and the Meg Ryan that everybody thought they knew.