Kendall and I just saw the haunting, semi-disturbing film “Birth” in which Nicole Kidman thinks a 10-year-old boy is her reincarnated husband. The movie is best known for the controversy regarding the bathtub scene between Kidman and the boy. I’ve even heard some people say that it’s child pornography which is just ludicrous. I’m not even sure I’d say the film is about reincarnation as much as it is about the tortured psychology of these characters. Nicole Kidman is great (as are the boy and Lauren Bacall), and I have to admire her desire to keep taking difficult roles in non-Hollywood movies. I wonder if she does the big budget films like “The Stepford Wives” just so that she can make smaller, offbeat films like “Birth.” I couldn’t even sit through last year’s “Dogville” but I admire her giving it a go instead of staying on a safe track. I bet she’s given her agent an ulcer ten times over for all her unusual choices. Not that I’m dissing her mainstream roles—I thought “To Die For” was superb and I can’t wait for the upcoming “Bewitched” remake with Kidman as Samantha and Shirley MacLaine as Endora.
I have to admit that I always enjoy movies that touch on reincarnation and “Birth” is one of the most interesting of the lot. Most of those films are either exploitative and spooky such as “The Reincarnation of Peter Proud” (which does not stand up to the test of time), or sappy like “Made in Heaven” with Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis (and an unbilled cameo by Hutton’s then-wife Debra Winger as God), or utterly hilarious like “Defending Your Life” starring Albert Brooks as a crazy neurotic Jewish character named DANNY MILLER and Meryl Streep as the most perfect dead shiksa ever to fall in love with a dead Jew. One of my all-time favorite reincarnation flicks (cue the gay search engines) is “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” with Barbra Streisand’s klutzy New York chain smoker Daisy Gamble suddenly realizing she was once a regal 18th century mystic named Melinda Tentrees. It was Vincente Minnelli’s last Big Musical and included a young Jack Nicholson as Barbra’s swingin’ half brother Tad who was in love with her. Oy.
I may as well out myself further and say that I do believe in reincarnation. I’ve just had too many strong gut feelings about it to discount even though I obviously can’t prove it to anyone and have no desire to try. I sure don’t believe I was anyone famous like Napoleon or Ulysses Grant—if anything, I’m sure most of us were peasants spending our days in some God-forsaken field threshing wheat. I did have a trance channeller tell me long ago that I was the son of Crazy Horse and then a writer named Louis Spence. And more recently someone told me about several past-life connections to the 1909 house we now live in. Who knows. I’m not as interested as I used to be in knowing more about possible past lives. What’s the point? Maneuvering through this lifetime is hard enough.
Shirley Maclaine as Endora???? HEAVEN!!
Speaking of heaven, remember when I used to train dogs for the pharoah in Egypt? That was fun.
Posted by: your sister | January 12, 2005 at 06:41 AM