This month sees a pair of eclectic filmmakers taking a stab at more mainstream flicks, with decidedly mixed results. With "In The Cut," New Zealand's Jane Campion -- long a leading light of independent cinema, whose 1993 film "The Piano" took home three Oscars -- tries to shoehorn her concerns into a serial-killer flick with a Hollywood star, Meg Ryan. Meanwhile, the Coen brothers -- America's most successful cinematic oddballs -- attempt a straight-up, albeit sharp-edged romantic comedy with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in "Intolerable Cruelty."
Campion's movie smacks of a director trying to have it both ways, and ending up with neither. To her credit, she stays true to her themes, exploring the darker side of female desire and the dynamics of sexual power within a tightly controlled atmosphere of seedy dread in present-day NYC. The downside, however, is that the genre requirements of suspense and creepy thrills take a back seat. Campion's also stuck with a ludicrous final act, which undoes a lot of the better bits that precede it. (It's better, though, than the slow butchery that ends the Susanna Moore novel this is based on.)
Ryan plays Frannie Avery, a 40-ish, but still single, professor of English literature at a New York university. She's largely given up on finding Mr. Right, but her half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), is still playing the field and encouraging Frannie to do the same. For a woman who's not getting any, though, Frannie's entire life seems to exist in an eroticized daze: She meets a buff student who's obviously hitting on her in a dingy bar full of hookers, where she watches one customer getting a blow job in the toilet. Later, she's drawn to a gruff detective, Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), who's investigating a gruesome murder that was committed near Frannie's apartment. She goes out on a "date" with Malloy to another scuzzy bar, where Malloy and his wife-beating partner, Rodriguez (Nick Damici), engage in locker-room talk that would have any sane woman heading for the exit. ("All a guy needs in a woman is a hole, tits, and a heartbeat." "You don't even need the tits." "Or the heartbeat.")
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