Birthday Girl

Nicole Kidman's luxurious copper mane and moonbeam pale tones must have presented a something of a problem throughout her career. It's hard, after all, to pay full attention to her performances when a guy has to keep swabbing the drool off his chin. Kidman knows this, I suspect, and in the past 12 months has launched a counterstrike of sorts with her performances in both Moulin Rouge and The Others, which quashed naysayers and fans of Malice alike and rocketed her into the ranks of “serious” actors. Never mind that Kidman has always evinced brazen and visceral smarts when it came to (most of) her chosen roles. Witness her early-career first strikes in Dead Calm and To Die For; in both pictures she radiated a forceful kind of smart-bombshell sass that bespoke the tidal currents of promise eddying inside. (Practical Magic we can discount as a fluke -- who wouldn't want to work with Aidan Quinn and Stockard Channing?) The British comedy Birthday Girl isn't up in the rarefied air of her other films this year, but even in this trifle -- it's a romantic comedy and with Ben Chaplin, and, gee, that's about as trifling as you can get -- Kidman's a knockout. Chaplin, forever doomed to play the weak-chinned romantiguy, plays John Buckinham, a sad-sack bank clerk who's so lonesome in his adequate life that he drifts about looking like a party balloon with a slow leak -- you can almost hear the air hissing out of his dreams. With his sensible outfits and prim demeanor he's a parody of English schoolboy non-charm, and, when he takes the proverbial bull by the horns and e-mails for a Russian mail-order bride, he gets -- only in the movies, baby -- Nicole Kidman. Actually, he gets a non-English-speaking, heavily mascaraed woman named Nadia. Kidman is all demure looks and shy glances here, but she's got the tentative half-steps and confused silences of this fresh-off-the-boat looker down pat. Frustrated that he ordered a fluent bride-to-be and ended up with Kidman (go figure), Chaplin tries mightily to send her back, to no avail. He changes his mind quickly enough, however, when Nadia finds his stash of B&D porn and consents to his fetishes posthaste. (There's something vaguely icky about that -- the silent sex bomb acquiescing to the leather and school-tie netherworld of this newfound stranger -- but Kidman's charm (and sexuality) defuses it. Anyway, in the end it makes sense.) All's fun and frolic, then, until Nadia's hustler “cousin” arrives and things go from dotty-but-quaint to ridiculous. Birthday Girl's charms are entirely Kidman's, and when the film opens up in the second and third acts it becomes (unwisely so) an Americanization of itself, complete with hotel-room fisticuffs, abusive tough guys, and foxes on the run. If only writer/director Butterworth had had the sense to keep things from heading into the arena of cliché this might have been a smashingly black-comic meditation on loneliness and the redemptive powers of a little leatherplay. No such luck. Still, it's worth checking out if only to see Kidman immolate everything else on screen through sheer sexy charisma. Tom who?