If there’s a secret to Nicole Kidman’s recent winning streak in Moulin Rouge and The Others, it’s that she seemed more involved in those offbeat roles than in much of her previous work. In Birthday Girl, Kidman keeps the streak alive with a performance that combines intense sensuality and bruised innocence. At the very least, the film proves that while Kidman’s marital status has changed, her taste for offbeat roles hasn’t.
The premise—meek British guy orders himself a Russian bride over the Internet—is so full of possibilities, even the characters ask each other, “What will happen?” What does happen is a movie that resists the pigeonholing critics are so fond of, but let me try anyway: it’s a quirky Brit comedy, a sentimental romance, and a caper flick all in one. And it all works—up to a point.
The meek British guy in question is John Buckingham (Ben Chaplin). John lives in a small, brown, ant-infested house in a suburban London neighborhood as nondescript as he is, and he’s held down the same dull bank job for ten years. Like many such average men his age, John relieves his passive-aggressive frustrations with porn—in particular, videos and men’s magazines with names like Hog-Tied Bitches. (The best thing about Chaplin’s performance is how he renders even this dubious kink quaintly pathetic. Wearing every expression on an open face that epitomizes nice-guy harmlessness, he makes it hard to imagine anyone a hog-tied woman would be safer with.)
John’s colorless life changes dramatically when he goes to the airport to meet Nadia (Kidman), the Russian bride he has ordered from a website. (He calls it “quite a brave, reasonable thing to do,” without stopping to think that brave and reasonable are as strange a pair of bedfellows as he and Nadia.) Expecting the English-speaking nonsmoker he requested, he is aghast to learn that Nadia speaks only Russian and smokes like a Chernobyl chimney. But when he tries to return her to sender, the mail-order service won’t return his calls.
Luckily, Nadia has compensating charms—namely a voracious sexual appetite (not to mention the face and body of Nicole Kidman). When she discovers John’s porn stash and lets him indulge his bondage fetish, he quickly decides that the language barrier and smoking aren’t such a big deal after all. She may not understand him verbally, but they have great conversations in the universal language of sex. Besides, there’s nothing like restraints to make a man lose his restraint. (Dressed in various shabby punk-waif outfits, Kidman comes on like a femme fatale with a wide streak of vulnerability; she projects exactly the combination of exotic-vixen fantasy and damsel-in-distress desperation a porn-addled singleton might expect from a Russian mail-order bride.)
Things get complicated on Nadia’s birthday, with the unexpected arrival of Nadia’s two Russian “cousins” (played by Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz, both French actors). To say any more would spoil the crucial plot twist that gives the film so much variety, but I will say that what comes after the twist is less convincing and more predictable than the events that lead up to it. Situations suddenly become more familiar, while the unlikely romance becomes really unlikely as we’re asked to buy more plausibility-straining contrivances than the limited chemistry between Kidman and Chaplin can afford. Even the direction (by British playwright Jez Butterworth, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Tom) gets more conventional and straightforward. Once they’ve hit us with that plot twist, the Butterworth brothers simply run out of fresh ideas. The question that was so open-ended at the beginning—”What will happen?”—is a foregone conclusion well before the ending, making Birthday Girl less of a surprise party than it might have been
(2.5/4)