By Tanya Batson, Staff ReporterIN THE Cut is a stain on what has been a great film career for Meg Ryan. It is a huge smudge on joyous memories produced by the likes of French Kiss, City of Angels and Kate and Leopold.
The movie is based on a novel by Susanna Moore. Moore co-writes the screenplay with Jane Campion, who also directs the film. The result of this collaboration is a grave, long exercise in tedium. In The Cut should have been at least cut, or at best simply abandoned on a shelf where it could do no harm to either Ryan's career or the audiences who would attend.
Meg Ryan plays Frannie, a lovelorn teacher who has ambitions of becoming a writer. She appears to be the only character who was not thrown in for distraction purposes, or to enhance a thriller which never arrived. Frannie appears to be a very lonely woman, who has contact with very few people.
Her main source of affection is her sister Pauline, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Kevin Bacon plays Frannie's rejected lover while Sharief Pugh plays one of her students, Cornelius Webb, to whom Frannie is apparently a little too close.
As the central character, Frannie is not a very interesting one. She generates no curiosity about what makes her tick, and the writers hardly bother to fill us in.
In the background to the questionable relationship that develops between Frannie and Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) is a series of gruesome murders. However, though there are a few 'investigation-like' questions, there are no real signs of an investigation. As such, intrigue never surfaces its beautiful head.
Between the many silences which populate In The Cut are quite a few sex scenes. They are, however, as unsexy as the characters who engaged in them. Indeed, they may have in them a clue of how to put the pornography industry out of business.
FOCUS ON DESPERATION
Actually, In The Cut could be used as anti-Sex And The City medication. Whereas the HBO comedy shows the high, fabulous side of living in a city, In The Cut focuses on sad, lonely desperation.
However, while desperation can be so coloured, that like a brutal accident one cannot help but look and then wince, it is very hard to even try to care about the characters in In The Cut. They manage to dredge up neither like nor dislike. Apathy is all they afford.
In The Cut is a failed attempt at making drab reality, even remotely interesting. Several of the characters seemed to have been thrown in to add to the intrigue which never arrived. The climax of the film is so uninteresting that it does not deserve the word.
To top it off, making In The Cut approximately two hours long is simply an exercise in extreme cruelty. Most of the movie is spent waiting for it to get somewhere. By the time an hour has passed, you can decide that the movie is headed nowhere and going there slowly just to taunt you. The end only brings satisfaction because it signifies that you can now go home and indulge in watching paint dry, a task that would be far more interesting.
