Critics and moviegoers generally dismissed In The Cut, the 2003 noir thriller starring Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo now out on DVD. Only 33% of the critics at RottenTomatoes.com liked it, and the film scored an average grade of 4.9 out of 10 from said critics. At the box office the film made only about $5 million domestically, also according to RottenTomatoes.com. By all counts, it was a staggering failure.
The critical and financial failure of the film is all the more staggering given the presence of Jane Campion, who achieved some stature as a feminist director with The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady, and Meg Ryan, box office favourite in When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. Throw in Nicole Kidman as producer, and some raw sex scenes involving Ryan, and you would expect at least critical or financial success, maybe even both.
In The Cut is not a bad film. It may even be a good film. The problem seems to lie in its unconventional presentation of the noir genre, which, by defying audience expectations, gave most critics (and probably most audience members) a sense that the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon offers a typical review of the film:
What, exactly, does Campion -- who both directed and adapted the screenplay -- mean to say with "In the Cut"? I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that I laughed more than once at poor Meg Ryan as Frannie, the mild-mannered and sexually bashful New York schoolteacher who becomes entangled in a serial-murder case being investigated by Detective James Malloy, a boorish hunka man who strides purposefully through the movie in the form of Mark Ruffalo.
Zacharek sees the film as broadly conceived (no pun intended) and lacking either symbolic import or gritty naturalism. That is, the film is no good at being either a modernist perusal of gender thematics or a naturalist slice of bleak chic. Zacharek writes,
I struggled with "In the Cut," not because its themes were so complex, or because its images were so artful or so disturbing, but because I wondered how a movie made by an ostensibly thinking person (though I think saying even that much gives Campion way too much credit) could leave me feeling so totally lobotomized.
A.O. Scott of the NY Times condensed Zacharek’s search for words into a pithy dismissal of the discordant elements here; In The Cut, he says, is an “ungainly hybrid.” Roger Ebert couldn’t even remember the word around which the film circulates: It’s “disarticulate,” Roger, not “de-articulate.”
In The Cut tries to reinvent the noir genre from a feminist perspective. The central intertext here is Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which Meg Ryan’s character Frannie Avery is teaching in what appears to be a high school English class (I say “appears” because it is unclear how old the students are, and I thought that in the book she was a college professor of linguistics). Frannie references Woolf’s use of “stream of consciousness,” a literary technique used to approximate the functioning of the unconscious mind in everyday apprehension. This method was a reaction to the realism of primarily masculine writers who preceded Woolf in the late nineteenth century.
Instead of focussing on the material details of the story’s milieu, stream of consciousness writing focuses, not surprisingly, on the characters’ conscious experience of the milieu. Woolf thought that everything one needed to know about life was contained within the experiences of a single person on a single day. It’s not what happens that matters in this type of writing, but how it is experienced. One of Frannie’s students in the film actually complains about the absence of plot in To The Lighthouse, and one has to read this comment as a metacinematic moment in which In The Cut (note the parallel construction of the title and To The Lighthouse) comments on its own problematic structure.
In The Cut actually begins with Frannie waking from a dream, and maintains through its hazy cinematography a sense of dreamstate throughout the film; at least part of the reason the film seems to be an “ungainly hybrid” is because it is not entirely composed of the conventions of linear storytelling, but instead occasionally injects the film with dreams and a subjectivity tinged with desire and death. This is not simply anyone’s dream, however: This is supposed to be the noir genre envisioned through the refraction of the feminine unconscious. The use of To The Lighthouse as an intertext suggests this reading. The fact that Frannie also goes to an actual lighthouse (a big, red phallic one) at the end of the film also suggests this reading.
In To The Lighthouse, the egocentric and analytic Mr. Ramsay is contrasted with the archetypal mother figure in Mrs. Ramsay. The combination of masculine and feminine traits resides in the artist Lily Briscoe, the character one might say is loosely the thematic equivalent of Meg Ryan’s Frannie. The contrast of masculine and feminine principles in To The Lighthouse offers a framework for understanding the feminist rewriting of the noir genre in In The Cut. Traditional film noir,
(literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics who noticed the trend of how dark and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following the war. It is a style of American films that first evolved in the 1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic period until about 1960.
Noir refers primarily to the mood or tone of a film. The protagonists of such films “are often morally ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they are cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive and ultimately losing.” In The Cut reverses this convention by casting a woman in the lead role as a “frightened and insecure” loner. Women in film noir are usually of two types: dutiful or femme fatale. “Usually, the male protagonist in film noir has to inevitably choose (or have the fateful choice made for him) between the women -- and invariably he picks the femme fatale who destructively goads him into committing murder or some other crime of passion.” In The Cut places this choice in the character of Frannie, who must choose from a lot of creepy potential mates: a psychotic stalker and former boyfriend, played by Kevin Bacon; a foulmouthed cop who may also be the killer, played by Mark Ruffalo; and a student from Frannie’s class who writes about serial killer John Wayne Gacy. All of these men make sexual overtures.
The key reversal in In The Cut is that of the femme fatale, a role which is ostensibly played by Mark Ruffalo’s cop, since Frannie must choose from this lot of creepy dudes and she chooses the potentially most dangerous one (since he could be the killer). Frannie chooses him for many of the same reasons male protagonists in film noir choose the femme fatale: he’s sexually attractive to her in a primitive way, and part of his allure is the mystery of his identity. Critics never say, when talking about film noir of the traditional kind, “Why the hell would he choose the lethal hottie?” This reflects the masculine bias of much criticism. Male reviewers know they too would probably pursue the sexy but potentially lethal woman. Yet, many reviewers of In The Cut are dismayed by the number of seemingly poor or thoughtless decisions Frannie makes. In the real world her decisions would be unconscionably stupid; but in film noir such decisions are supposed to reflect human weakness.
“The protagonists in film noir are normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes.” Frannie is driven by both. Frannie is driven by a story her mother told her about how she met Frannie’s father. The story is told in sepia-toned flashback, like a silent film of the mind. In Frannie’s dream of her mother’s courtship with her father, the two are ice skating when her father dumps his fiancé and proposes to Frannie’s mother. Later in the film, after a series of grisly murders, Frannie dreams of her father ice skating over her mother’s legs and cutting them up, then returning to cut off her head.
The dream reflects Frannie’s anxiety over the potential violence in courtship. Frannie’s expectations for her own desire and its socially accepted expressions are based on the mythology of romanticism. She and her sister obsess over finding a man and getting married. But what kind of solution is a mate, necessarily? Like other noir films that reduce human relations to their most mundane and malicious attributes, In The Cut posits men as nothing more than homicidal maniacs or sources of pleasure; but the pursuit of this pleasure is both the human necessity and the human weakness, because men are violent animals.
The problem with the common complaint that Campion paints her portrait of Frannie with such broad strokes that everything in the film becomes a caricature – that is, that men, all of them, are nothing but sexually voracious predators – is that the complaint ignores the highly subjective method of stream of consciousness storytelling. Filtered through the consciousness of Frannie Avery, perhaps all men do seem to be predators; consider the exemplars in her immediate vicinity. People always generalize based on their immediate experience, and Frannie is no different. The difference for the film noir genre as told from a woman’s perspective, however, is that it is men, not women, who perpetuate the function of the femme fatale, the character who represents the tragic consequences of our human weaknesses.
Women are told they have no value unless they are attached to a man, and yet men possess the greater potential for violence. In the conventional film noir, the man has a choice between two types of women, only one of which is dangerous. In the feminist revision, there is no safe choice, and yet the choice must be made. This is the paranoia and fatalism of In The Cut.
Perhaps the problem with a feminist rendition of film noir is in the paradoxical combination of noir’s fatalism and feminism’s liberatory politics. How can a film espouse simultaneously the belief that human beings are so inherently flawed that they destroy themselves in the end, and the belief that women can aspire to equality with men in some form of social transformation? Film noir makes everyone a victim of human fallibility. The answer to this might be: The feminist telling of film noir differs in the telling, not in the lesson of the film. Fatalism may win out in any form of film noir, but the feminist version changes what matters along the way to that self-destruction.
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