Stars: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Director: Jane Campion
Released: 10/2003
Rating: 1 stars

This is a film where romatic comedy sweetheart Meg Ryan attempts to change her image. In the film, Ryan strips bare in full frontal nudity, simulates masterbation, simulates recieving oral sex, simulates having sex. The story has Ryan playing a lonely, awkward school teacher with a passion for poetic phrases. Outside her apartment, a severed head is discovered which brings Mark Ruffalo's police detective to her door in the investigation. She is immediately attracted to the detective, who seduces her by listing the sexual services he is willing to provide her. Eventually, she begins to suspect he may be the serial killer he is searching for, a suspicion which leads to tension in their relationship.

This film is so bad, I'm not sure where to start. The writing is awful, with not a single believable character in the cast. Ruffalo's detective explicitly lists his sexual services at the beginning of a first date. How many people talk this way? Come on. How many women, being so romantically seduced, would continue sitting on the barstool? Come on. The absolute worst example, though, is near the end. Frannie suspects Ruffalo is the man who has brutally murdered her sister, and dismembered her body, leaving Ryan holding the severed head. But have no worries. A suspicion like that isn't enough to get in the way of them having sex. Nor is the trauma of Frannie being nearly raped earlier in the day. None of this is believable. Everything appears bent on provding explicit sexual dialog, followed by long scenes of Ryan's naked body.

The script relies on outrageous contrivances. In a shadowy bar basement, Frannie watches a woman performing oral sex on an unseen man. Because she is at a distance, and his face is in shadows, she cannot see who the man is. But she can see the tiny tatoo on his forearm very clearly. This identification is crucial to her suspicions of the detective, since he has a similar tatoo. She can also clearly see the color of the woman's fingernail polish, again a crucial observation as the woman in question is the woman whose head is found outside her window. And, of course, there is the amazing coincidence that she would happen on the killer getting it on with his future victim, and that he would then drop the head right outside her window.

I've always been offended at the way sex and nudity are used in film as an attempt to cover up the weaknesses of a script. Rather than making the effort to fix up the screenplay, writers just have the female leads take off their clothes. If they are running out of ideas and need some padding to the "story", they include 5 minute sex scenes to fill the time. Anytime a film has copious amounts of nudity and full contact sex, you can be assured the script is pretty weak. In the Cut demonstrates this perfectly. The marketing for the film is such that the only thing they can grab on to as a selling point is Ryan's nudity. The story is awful and the acting mediocre. What's left? Meg's pubies.

Any possibility of the story gaining some momentum and building interest is obliterated when everything grinds to a halt so our leads can have sex, followed on one occasion by a discussion on how Ruffalo's character learned how to perform oral sex on women. For a film that drags on for two hours, these long disruptions just add to the drudgery of watching it.

On top of all this, the film is interspersed with flashback images of a man and woman ice skating. These are filmed with an air of fantasy. We are told by Franny that the man and woman are her parents. What is the purpose of these flashbacks? Who knows. When the woman falls on the ice and the man skates over her legs, severing them from her body, is there a point? No. Just another bizarre image in a film that has absolutely no idea what is is trying to do.

My rating system has a minimum value of 1 star. If I could give it a 0 or negative, I would.

Last updated 02/11/2004 10:39 AM