#69 of 2011: Birth

Only extraordinarily focused storytelling can make a viewer feel so strongly about the emotions of characters who she knows almost nothing about and who she has no reason to particularly like. "Birth" never gets off topic, except for temporary indulgences in pure contemplation of the setting (that dining room, my god). Even then, the small, overpatterned, overlush rooms of Anna's apartment- rarely without a preponderance of visitors, supposedly still at their ten-years-long work of stabilizing Anna's emotions- are a physical reminder of the overwhelming density of the simple storyline.

It's important to note how huge a role omission plays in the film's poignancy. The decision to represent the original Sean minimally (with only an imageless voiceover at the opening of the film, followed by a faceless body running through the snow for 2.5 minutes before succumbing matter-of-factly to a heart attack) lays the foundation for the tense and unresolvable ambiguity about whether or not something paranormal is at work: we have to take most of our cues from Anna, because we can't compare the dead Sean to the boy Sean, played by Cameron Bright. The latter's performance is, itself, a kind of fillable blank- slow, deliberate, contemplative, cryptic. When he's on screen with Nicole Kidman's Anna (an irreparably affected woman whose apparent brokenness seems more and more to come from a well of deluded commitment to an ideal that probably never existed in the first place), it's almost as if we can see the clean slate of his nearly expressionless face and tone of voice being filled in by her desperation for the love she thought was hers when her husband was alive.

Another omission: answers. As always, I was perfectly happy to find no clean explanation for the mentally fatiguing ordeal that both main characters (and viewers, too) experience due to this plot. Hard facts are of negligible importance by the end of the film, if they were ever important at all.

Oh yea, and Lauren Bacall is the matriarch.