BIRTH

BIRTH (2004). Director: Jonathan Glazer.

"I thought you were my dead husband, but you're just a little boy in my bathtub."

Anna (Nicole Kidman) is about to remarry near the tenth anniversary of the death of her first husband, Sean. Along comes a ten-year-old boy, whose name is also Sean, who tells Anna that she must not remarry because he is her late husband. Is this an actual reincarnation at work, or is there something wrong with the child? It really doesn't matter -- and the characters don't wonder about it as much as they might -- because it becomes clear long before Anna and young Sean sit in a bathtub together in the nude that whatever its "romantic" pretensions this film is merely contrived to create a situation in which there is sexual tension between an adult and a child. [Anna takes an awfully long time to tell Sean that she doesn't want him in the tub.] In other words ---yuck! What we have here is a film like Tadpole, pseudo-intellectual pedophile chic -- or rather shit. You have to wonder why many critics don't see through this stuff, and why actors like Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall lend their names to what is really just a more "acceptable" variation of kiddie porn. [Although one wonders how acceptable this would have seemed had the adult been male and the child female, or both male?] The film also suffers from disjointed continuity, and is at times quite laughable. I'll spare the name of the intense boy actor who appears in this, but what on earth were his parents thinking? You don't have to be open-minded to like this, just stupid.

Verdict: If you want to think this is "artistic," be my guest, but I think it's crap. 0 stars.

TADPOLE

TADPOLE (2002) Director: Gary Winick. Screenplay by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller.

An intelligent fifteen-year-old who fancies himself more sophisticated than he really is develops an infatuation on his middle-aged stepmother (Sigourney Weaver, pictured) and has little interest in girls his own age. At one point he has sex with his stepmother's forty-ish friend, played by Bebe Neuwirth. When the parents, including father John Ritter, find out about this, they hardly react the way they would in real life, although at least Weaver seems a little bit appalled. She, too, winds up kissing her stepson, although this – fortunately – does not lead to another bedroom scene. In the way of the immature, the boy gets over his crush pretty fast, and the movie is left without a climax or any real resolution. The only point of Tadpole seems to be to present pedophilia – and make no mistake, that's what this is – as an acceptable option to women who can't find sensitive boyfriends their own age. Neuwirth's choice to molest the boy seems determined by the fact that her current beau is not attractive to her [then why is she bothering with the man at all?]. The scene where she rationalizes her actions to Weaver takes place in Central Park near the statues of Alice in Wonderland characters – a rather heavy-handed reference if ever there were one. One can only imagine the outcry this film would have gotten had the youngster been a girl instead of a boy, and if the molester were male. [Or if both adult and child were males!] Despite some good acting [by adult performers who should have known better] and an excellent performance by Aaron Stanford as the boy, this is pseudo-sophisticated pedophilic junk and not memorable at all.

Verdict: Forget it. 1/2*.