To paraphrase former football coach Dennis Green, "It was what we thought it was."
Because Jane Campion is the only woman ever to receive two Oscar nominations for best director, winning one of them, there's been an inclination to reappraise her 2003 thriller In the Cut. At the very least, the hosts spoke about it with some favorability when they looked back on it on Filmspotting. It's tempting to give an artist who has made some indisputably great films a little leeway when looking at her misfires. Dare I say this tendency might be even greater when it's a woman, of whom there are relatively few to celebrate at this level in this industry.
But everyone is capable of making a stinker, even Jane Campion.
I should say the rating I am giving my final Campion feature on Letterboxd is two stars. That might clear it from "stinker" territory. So either this film does have some saving graces, or I am not immune to the notion of boosting my appraisal of the films of someone like Campion.
It's just that when it came out in 2003, it seemed like yet another one of those erotic detective thrillers that had their heyday in the 1990s before slowly starting to peter out in the 2000s, and that's pretty much exactly what it is.
In fact, if I were looking for something to differentiate this from others of its ilk -- some little twinkling idea that Campion brought to the project that a lesser director couldn't have -- I can't really find it.
If you're hoping for a strong character from Meg Ryan, representing an undercurrent of feminism in the film, you'll be disappointed. Even someone with Campion's smart sensibilities is unable to prevent this from being a character who has things happen to her, not who drives the action. She spends a fair bit of time crying pathetically as men toss her around like a rag doll. This was standard practice for a woman in a thriller in 2003, but it has not aged well, and it would have seemed like Campion could have done better by her lead character, even back then.
Then there's the men. Each is reprehensible in his own way, which is okay depending on how it's handled -- perhaps this is the feminism of Campion peeking through. But even though their behavior reads to us as vile, within the film itself it is not sufficiently repudiated, leaving an unsavory taste. Particularly unsavory, at least by today's standards, is the monstrous behavior of a young Black man who is one of Ryan's students, one of the red herrings about who might be the killer. There's a scene where it is implied he would have raped her had there not been a deus ex machina sort of intervention.
Mark Ruffalo is good, as he always is, but I loathed his character and his retrograde opinions about women, even some possible racism. (He says the way to flirt with a Black chick is that you stare back at her.) Clearly Campion is not trying to present us a knight in shining armor, but even within his own character there are inconsistencies. For example, he violates protocol by asking Ryan's character out even though he's just interviewed her as a potential witness to a murder. Perhaps it's not the same as asking out a suspect, but it's sketchy anyway. Then later in the movie there's a line where he says "I was doing perfectly fine before I met you," as though she were the instigator of their relationship and to blame for messing with his head. Then he's got a sexually aggressive quality throughout that is especially hard to stomach today.
In the Cut is one of those movies that uses the psychosexual dynamics of its lead characters as a driver for the parts of the story that are supposed to interest us most, and that's the problem with every erotic thriller -- maybe the reason why it essentially died out as a viable genre. Maybe there was a time we did feel like the animal magnetism between two characters and the various ways they tear each other's clothes off was enough to hold our interest. That time has now passed.
Really, I doubt my impression of In the Cut would have been any different 20 years ago -- no better, no worse. I don't think any one of those erotic thrillers became a special favorite of mine, though if I drilled down into my Flickchart account I'd probably start to find the exceptions. Watching this movie, I kept trying to find the Campionisms, the bits of filmmaking prowess that elevated this material. Outside of a few shots -- there's one involving water on an out-of-focus light that I found quite distinctive -- this felt like it could have been the work of any old hack.
It's also one of those movies that reminds me of something that's probably obvious, which is that 20 years ago is now a long time ago and films looked a lot different back then. There's a lot of super saturation of color and unfocusing of backgrounds that probably registered as visually dynamic back then, but today just ages the film. I don't suppose any film can really escape the era in which it was made, but some are more indebted to it than others. The great films become ageless, while the lesser ones become part of the wallpaper that defined a particular time period.
Well I wish I could say the end result of this series were more positive. It turns out I'd made smart choices in which Campion and Bigelow films I'd seen and which I'd left to catch up with at some future unspecified date.
There's some positive news in that I loved Bigelow's Near Dark, the vampire movie she made in 1987. (Which almost certainly looks like a film made in 1987, though at least that's a look we aspire to nowadays.) However, I was significantly negative on the other two films I watched, The Loveless and Blue Steel, with Blue Steel actually having a huge amount in common with In the Cut. If I were ranking these six films, Bigelow's would be at either end of the spectrum, occupying spots 1, 5 and 6.
It's hard even to say which Campion film I liked best, though I guess it would have to be An Angel at My Table from 1990. The way the film is tied into her New Zealand roots -- almost to the same extent as her debut, Sweetie, which I really like -- gives it a certifiable edge over Holy Smoke, which shares too much in common with In the Cut in terms of the aforementioned psychosexual dynamics. So I suppose, that does make In the Cut a logical part of her oeuvre, even if it's too generic in all other respects.
Having now done this in three straight years with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and these two women, I plan to give the "complete a filmography" format a rest in 2024, at least for one year. But that doesn't mean I won't have a bi-monthly series, maybe just the one, as opposed to the three I've been working through in 2023. I'll tell you all about that in January.
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