Movie-making the cut

• 'Cut' exposes Meg Ryan's sensual side

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Hawai'i author Susanna Moore's (above) darkly sexual novel "In the Cut" was directed by New Zealand's Jane Campion and stars a fuller-lipped Meg Ryan and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Yet when Moore went looking for her novel, "The Whiteness of Bones," in a Honolulu shop a while back, she was barely able to find a copy. The bookstore had hidden it in the medical section. It's become a running joke between her and her publisher that she'll be sent anywhere on book tours, except to Hawai'i.

Add to this the fact that the film version of her darkly sexual novel "In the Cut," directed by Jane Campion and starring Meg Ryan in a genre-breaking, disturbing role, has caused a critical buzz around the country, but has generated barely a low hum in the Islands.

"I have far more readership in, say, Frankfurt than I do in Honolulu, and I've always been bewildered by this," said Moore by telephone from her home in Brooklyn. "It seems very perverse to me, and, of course, heartbreaking. I have a need to write about Hawai'i. It's the great love of my life, and it is where I hope to end up, sooner or later. ... My homesickness has not abated one scintilla since the day I left."

It may be that Moore's writing is not the kind of rosy reminiscence that Island readers want or expect. In her trilogy, she writes about what's beneath the "professional-class, white, martini-drinking, perfectly pleasant" lifestyle of Honolulu's upper-crust neighborhoods in the '50s, '60s and '70s. She writes about what are termed in today's facile code, "dysfunctional families," about sensuality and — in a thread that's clearly autobiographical — she explores how growing up amid a then-fading indigenous culture populates a young woman's world with myth and magic.

Moore delves further into this flow between Hawaiian tradition and contemporary life in "I Myself Have Seen It," (National Geographic, hardback, $20, published last April). The title is based on the habitual refrain of a Moloka'i storyteller, Auntie Harriet Ne'e. "After every story, she would say that — no matter how preposterous or extreme or fanciful or mythical or dreamlike the story had been," Moore recalled. "I was enthralled by that and half-believed it, more than half-believed it. If it wasn't literally true, it was poetically true, which was enough, and is enough, for me."

She speaks in a rather fussy, precise way, but with a certain endearing musical quality. Moore cheekily tells Mainlanders that this is the way everyone in Hawai'i talks, but it sounds more like the voice of someone who went to some expensive European boarding school. She's obviously been asked about it before, because she has an answer at the ready: "I overenunciate. I think it comes from reading. It's kind of a Luddite holding onto language that exists in my head. It comes from the world of books."

"I Myself Have Seen It" is not the book Moore set out to write for National Geographic. She had planned to do a piece on India while she also researched a novel ("One Last Look," just published by Knopf) there. But after accepting the rather sizeable advance and spending months in India, she realized that the two projects were fighting with each other, and the fiction piece was winning. "I didn't have the money to give back to them, and I knew I'd be spending Christmas on Moloka'i, so I proposed, in some fear, that I do a book on Hawai'i and, to my immense relief, they agreed," she said.

She had set novels in the Islands but did not feel that she'd been able to say all that she wanted about what really interested her: "myth and storytelling and how we accommodate nature and the unknown to ourselves, and ourselves to it. And of course, the other thing is the myth of Hawai'i, the image and fantasy and how that has affected the place. I find that islands loan themselves to metaphor and myth, whether it's 'The Tempest' or Donne's famous poem, 'No Man is an Island.' The idea of an island is heavily laden with symbolism."

Day trip to the book store

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Susanna Moore Reared: In Honolulu; Punahou School, '63. First job after college: Saleswoman, then a model, for Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Came to writing: Via script-reading in Hollywood. Family: Daughter of the late Dr. Richard D. Moore (retired director emeritus of radiology at St. Francis Medical Center); two brothers, two sisters, one stepsister and a half-brother live in Hawai'i. Present home: Fort Greene, Brooklyn, N.Y.; will spend next year in Rome at the American Academy. Books: The Hawai'i trilogy — "My Old Sweetheart," "The Whiteness of Bones" and "Sleeping Beauties" — and "In the Cut" (all published by Knopf), now a movie by Jane Campion, starring Meg Ryan. A travel memoir of Hawai'i, "I Myself Have Seen It." Her latest novel, set in 19th-century India, is "One Last Look." Her next book: Untitled manuscript, for Knopf, about an American woman in prison for killing her two children. On her nightstand: The memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon (17th-century French writer of philosophy) in the new translation by Lucy Norton.

The writer recalls in precise detail setting out on what was then almost a daylong excursion by bus from Hawai'i Kai to the downtown Honolulu Book Shop ("next to Carol and Mary's"). Her parents allowed her to have an account there, but only to purchase one book at time. "This was not realistic ... because I read maybe a book every two days. But the hours spent choosing the book, the diminishment of choice, in a way increased the pleasure, the sublime pleasure of it," she said. Her tastes ran to classics and literary works, then as now. The children she tutors as a volunteer at a local shelter think she's slightly mad trotting out "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" or "Heidi" to read. "I might as well be picking something in Sanskrit," she says.

But this bothers her no more than her daughter's eye-rolling reaction to Moore's penchant for dated words: "I'll fetch a punnet of strawberries on my way to the cobbler."

"I'm lost in my head in an earlier time," she says with a shrug you can hear over the telephone. "I guess I feel safer there."

But her inner landscape is not merely a benign place of period phrases. An agent described her manuscript for the contemporary crime thriller "In the Cut" as the most disturbing thing he'd ever read, a work that shouldn't even be published, much less made into a film.

Easy to adapt to film noir

Moore, who enjoys good detective fiction, saw the book as a way to turn the traditionally male genre on its head and make it serve the subjects that interest her — language, the internal lives of women, sex and sensuality, men's conflicted feelings about women.

Some have said "In the Cut" is a departure from her other books, but Moore thinks the difference is only in appearance and setting. "They really are all about women. I am really interested in what it is to be a woman in all its manifestations, the truth of that," she said. "It's really a movie about female grief and female sorrow and loneliness."

The main story revolves around a woman who becomes involved with a homicide detective investigating murders in her neighborhood.

Moore researched the book for a year, hanging out with New York homicide detectives. "I was absolutely, instantaneously seduced by their use of language, the quickness, the humor, the vividness." She invented a character who is a linguist studying slang as a way of playing with this theme.

Moore said she is both surprised and not surprised that this book is now a movie: "I never, ever thought it would be a film ... It's a fable. It's extreme. It's flippant. It's ironic. It's always about language and ideas and not a great deal of plot. On the other hand, it's a genre piece and easily adaptable to a kind of steamy film noir."

The book trod a circuitous route to the screen. It was released in 1995 and Nicole Kidman bought the rights for Jane Campion, with whom she had just finished making "Portrait of a Lady." Kidman later sold the rights to Miramax, but after a thoughtful look at the story and its audience potential, company president Harvey Weinstein blanched and backed off.

"But Jane was absolutely steadfast," Moore said.

Campion found financing from the French company, Pathé, and then Sony, and signed Meg Ryan, whom Moore considers "inspired, remarkable casting," precisely because the role isn't what you'd expect of Ryan's tousle-headed little-girl type. "Jane did it. She really did it."

Moore did a first draft of the script, then another together with Campion and then left it to Campion to make a third (both get writing credit). (The writing took place in Waimea, Kaua'i, and she considers Campion, who is from New Zealand, another "island girl.")

Still, she said, she was surprised at how roiled up she was by the final cut. Just before this interview, she had seen "In the Cut" a fourth time, sneaking into the back of a showing and panel discussion at the Columbia University film school.

"I was as agitated and disturbed as the first time. I also thought it was a very silly thing to do to try to have a discussion afterward. There's something about this movie that leaves you stunned. You don't want to talk about it right away, not least because of your astonishment at the bravery of the performances and the bravery of the direction," she said. "I have no idea what people are going to make of this movie. It's so extreme and so brilliant and so disconcerting."

'Cut' exposes Meg Ryan's sensual side

Meg Ryan sure knows how to change the subject.

Three years ago, the tabloids swarmed all over the romantic-comedy sweetheart's crumbling private life like ants on so many broken cookies. Exhibits A and B: The dissolution, after nearly a decade, of her outwardly perfect celebrity marriage to Dennis Quaid. And her white-hot but soon-to-cool affair with her "Proof of Life" leading man, Russell Crowe.

In the eye of the upheaval, she confessed to W magazine, "So this is what it feels like to be the scarlet woman."

That was then. This is now.

What are the topics that preoccupy the press as her latest film, the decidedly unromantic, noncomedic thriller "In the Cut," arrives in theaters nationwide on Friday? Her suddenly plush and protruding lips (she's mum on the matter, but collagen injections or implants are speculated).

And the rest of her trim 41-year-old body, fully nude and otherwise in the film's startlingly frank sexual encounters.

This time, at least, it's all about her. Judging by the response, the career detour is as brazenly brilliant as the one taken by an earlier generation's cute ditz of choice: Diane Keaton's revelatory work in 1977's "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Though "In the Cut" itself was faulted (and hissed at during one festival screening), Ryan's performance has gathered plaudits. "Quiet, thoughtful and never displaying a need to be liked, Ryan shows a tough, rigorous aspect of herself that's new to films, not to mention a carnal side that's forthright and realistic," Daily Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote.

"I've been waiting for something like this for a long time," Ryan says. She grasps a Starbucks latte, her first caffeine jolt in what surely will be a long day of promotion.

Encased from neck to toe in a buttery tan leather jerkin and a long taupe skirt, she seems to be saying: "No sneak peeks. You have to see the movie."

Asked whether she is intentionally trashing her old image, Ryan insists, "I don't believe in cultivating image. I don't really believe it's actually even possible."

Then again, her new film, a bleak walk on the wild side into a neo-noir hell by New Zealand director Jane Campion ("The Piano"), would prove a departure for almost any actress.

The alternate title of the erotically charged genre piece could well be "You've Got Male," considering Ryan's introverted Manhattan teacher Frannie is being wooed by no fewer than three predatory suitors. There's a kinky homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) who crudely seduces her. A crazy former conquest (Kevin Bacon) who stalks her. And a troubled student (Sharrieff Pugh) who just happens to be writing a paper on mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.

To top it off, they all may be suspects in a series of slice-and-dice slayings of women in her downscale neighborhood.

Campion, known for searing dissections of the female psyche, was as surprised as anyone that Ryan wanted to be in her movie. "Meg is like an institution," she says. "Gorgeous Meg. 'What is she doing with her hair now?' You think of her like that. But I was always curious."

After original star Nicole Kidman, who did 1996's "The Portrait of a Lady" with Campion, dropped out of "In the Cut," "we needed someone who really wanted to be in this film, for whom it meant a lot," the filmmaker says. "Meg put her hand up. She is not one of the ones I would have been fishing around for. But she started really thinking about her acting and looking to do very different roles."

Ryan was required to do something she probably hasn't done since her "Amityville 3-D" days. "I auditioned," she declares proudly. "That was fine with me. I just wanted to meet Jane."

Not only did she get the role, she found a role model. "She's changed my life," Ryan says of Campion. "Not by any kind of direct teaching, but just to see how she lives her life and the freedom she demands for herself as an artist."

The result of this professional hookup? The media have been duly agog over the psychological deflowering of America's blond buttercup, beloved in such relationship romps as "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle," as she strips down and exposes her uninhibited side.

The naked truth is slightly less sensational. Ryan already has done nudity in several films, including "The Presidio" (1988) and "The Doors" (1991). And these days, it's a smart career move for actresses to take it all off. Witness a newly appreciated Halle Berry's Oscar win for 2001's "Monster's Ball" or a rediscovered Diane Lane with her nomination for last year's "Unfaithful."

Of course, you can't just flash the camera as if in a glorified "Girls Gone Wild" video. You have to bare your emotions if not your very essence onscreen. For Ryan, that is virgin territory. She works herself into convincing states of heavy-panting arousal with Ruffalo that are as uncomfortable to sit through as it is compelling.

"There's nothing gratuitous at all," Ryan says. "Maybe it feels more explicit because there's so much talking. It's a very sexy and very female aspect that doesn't get put on film. The only thing Jane said about the scenes is that she didn't want them to be coy. She didn't want them to seem like movie sex."

Ruffalo, an indie regular whose lucky break was 2000's "You Can Count on Me," gets to perform an act few guys would be man enough to try with Ryan: He talks dirty to her.

"There's really something subversive about it," he says. "To be talking dirty to America's sweetheart, you're really playing with something iconoclastic."

Probably what will be most shocking about "In the Cut" to those who firmly believe Ryan is forever Sally to Billy Crystal's Harry is how, in the guise of Frannie, she can shut down her whole arsenal of Meg-isms. The golden swirls of hair, the shiny blue orbs, the delirious smile. All replaced by brown locks, sullen eyes and a stern expression.

She is a little wistful about leaving Frannie behind. "There's not an ounce in her that wants to please or charm or be liked. Nothing. She's totally free to be herself."

After surviving personal turmoil, tabloid attacks and Hollywood typecasting, so is Meg Ryan.