In "The Great Gatsby," Nick Carraway remarks to his friend, "Just remember, you can't recapture the past." And the fatally optimistic Jay Gatsby replies, "Why, of course you can, Old Sport." Something like that.
Well, in this strange movie -- so unAmerican that it's almost treasonous -- Nicole Kidman has the same problem as Jay Gatsby. She's a young, widowed New Yorker with a handsome and attentive fiancé. Then a chunky-looking ten-year-old kid starts showing up at her building, claiming that he's a reincarnation of her late husband, to whom she is still emotionally attached.
She shoos him off but the kid (Cameron Bright) stolidly persists. When Kidman's family gets wind of this they call in the doctor in the family who quizzes the boy at length. If Kidman's late husband lectured recently -- he was a physicist -- what was the subject of the lecture? And even more intimate stuff, like where Kidman and her hubby "did it". (On the green sofa in the living room.) It's uncanny.
And disturbing too, because the kid keeps hanging around, never smiling, never laughing, always asserting his continuing love for Kidman, who finally begins to believe him, especially after he undresses and slips into the bathtub with her. It's understandable that Kidman's fiancé (Danny Huston) goes berserk at a music recital and starts to spank the little brat after throwing a piano at him. He and Kidman split up. She's now bonded with her husband in his new form and proposes that they run away together. In eleven years, he'll be twenty-one, she explains to him, and they can get married.
Things come to a head and I won't go on about it except to say that the climax is non-violent and the explanation, while making sense, still leaves the viewer as perturbed as it leaves Kidman.
I didn't expect much from it. A Lifetime Movie Network thing, perhaps, of the sort that has titles like, "Please Don't Take My Baby." But this was something else. It deserves plaudits. It violates all the sacerdotal features of modern American movies. It develops with a moderato pace. Nobody wrenches anybody else's head off. There are pauses between lines in the conversational exchanges. The performers are given a chance to assume expressions. The musical score suggests enchantment of an ominous kind. The locations are well used. The characterizations are believable. The denouement -- the resolution -- seems appropriately flat after the brilliance of the illusion.
It could have been made in Europe -- or it could have made a great screwball comedy. Maybe with a script by Thorne Smith.
Well, in this strange movie -- so unAmerican that it's almost treasonous -- Nicole Kidman has the same problem as Jay Gatsby. She's a young, widowed New Yorker with a handsome and attentive fiancé. Then a chunky-looking ten-year-old kid starts showing up at her building, claiming that he's a reincarnation of her late husband, to whom she is still emotionally attached.
She shoos him off but the kid (Cameron Bright) stolidly persists. When Kidman's family gets wind of this they call in the doctor in the family who quizzes the boy at length. If Kidman's late husband lectured recently -- he was a physicist -- what was the subject of the lecture? And even more intimate stuff, like where Kidman and her hubby "did it". (On the green sofa in the living room.) It's uncanny.
And disturbing too, because the kid keeps hanging around, never smiling, never laughing, always asserting his continuing love for Kidman, who finally begins to believe him, especially after he undresses and slips into the bathtub with her. It's understandable that Kidman's fiancé (Danny Huston) goes berserk at a music recital and starts to spank the little brat after throwing a piano at him. He and Kidman split up. She's now bonded with her husband in his new form and proposes that they run away together. In eleven years, he'll be twenty-one, she explains to him, and they can get married.
Things come to a head and I won't go on about it except to say that the climax is non-violent and the explanation, while making sense, still leaves the viewer as perturbed as it leaves Kidman.
I didn't expect much from it. A Lifetime Movie Network thing, perhaps, of the sort that has titles like, "Please Don't Take My Baby." But this was something else. It deserves plaudits. It violates all the sacerdotal features of modern American movies. It develops with a moderato pace. Nobody wrenches anybody else's head off. There are pauses between lines in the conversational exchanges. The performers are given a chance to assume expressions. The musical score suggests enchantment of an ominous kind. The locations are well used. The characterizations are believable. The denouement -- the resolution -- seems appropriately flat after the brilliance of the illusion.
It could have been made in Europe -- or it could have made a great screwball comedy. Maybe with a script by Thorne Smith.