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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, October 31, 2003

Meg Ryan's fractured 'In the Cut' doesn't cut the mustard

By Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic

IN THE CUT (R) One and a Half-Stars (Poor-to-Fair)

A professor has an affair with a police detective investigating a murder. But the detective may also be the suspect in this meandering erotic thriller. Starring Meg Ryan, Directed by Jane Campion.

"In The Cut" is a box of Cracker Jack without a prize. It's fun to chew on the contents for awhile, but you ultimately walk away disappointed.

On the surface, the film is about Frannie (Meg Ryan), a detached academic who strikes up a torrid love affair with Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), a police detective who's investigating a grisly murder in Frannie's neighborhood. In between dates, Frannie yaps with her half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and has odd, black-and-white dreams about her parents' first meeting on an ice-skating rink — a remembrance apparently directed by Orson Welles.

As a straight-up erotic thriller, "In The Cut" is too self-possessed, scattered and moody to function. Sure, Frannie and Malloy roll around under, and over, the sheets quite a bit, but the sex scenes don't feel like part of a larger whole.

To give the movie a claustrophobic feel, director Jane Campion shoves the camera into her actors' faces and leaves it there. Eventually, you're dying for just one shot from a helicopter, or at least the old blimp. The "thrill" is fairly routine: Through the introduction of various clues, we're led to believe that Malloy may be the killer.

Ryan, in a bid to shake her perky girl-next-door image, mopes about and sheds most of her clothing. Ruffalo gives a much edgier performance, despite residing behind a giant, Fuller Brush moustache.

Perhaps in an attempt to honor the book on which it is based, the movie is loaded with symbolism that pushes the audience toward a conclusion more complicated than just learning the murderer's name. But the film never reaches its destination, perhaps because Campion doesn't have the gumption to go the whole way.

In some respects, "In The Cut" plays more like a dream, or a memory, or a contemplation of reality rather than reality itself. Frannie is constantly stumbling across oddities and coincidences that would suggest she's not quite residing on terra firma.

More than once, she spots inspirational lines of poetry on the subway — lines that seem oddly convenient, given the circumstances. At one point, it appears that the same woman passes Frannie twice on the street, perhaps meaning her subconscious is filling in the details. Or maybe it's just bad editing.

The camera often lingers on vases of dead or dying flowers, especially in Frannie's presence. She's also often seen just wearing one shoe — she loses one during a mugging, then at a crime scene, then later at home.

When another character asks her why she's poorly shod, Frannie says the other shoe is "holding open the door." Literally, she's talking about the door to her apartment, but figuratively, she could be referring to a higher plane. There is also the recurrent theme of a lighthouse, which apparently is guiding Frannie, well, somewhere.

Good for her, but by this time, the audience is hopelessly lost.

Rated R for sex, language, nudity.