The sophomore effort of director Jonathan Glazer, after his auspicious debut with Sexy Beast, is nothing if not ambitious: a reincarnation mystery wherein a somber little ten-year-old (Cameron Bright, the little creep of Godsend) shows up at the doorstep of a newly engaged widow (Nicole Kidman in a Peter Pan haircut) to inform her that he is her reborn husband. A couple of generations earlier, such a starting point might have led to a racy farce in the tradition of Thorne Smith. But that was then; this is now. When the jealous fiancé takes his half-pint rival over his knee to paddle his behind, it isn't for laughs; it's in spluttering response to the breath-stopping episode in which the tiny tyke strips down and joins the full-bloom woman in her bathtub. There's no knowing whether the farcical approach would have worked, then or now, but it's a certainty that the striven-for note of New Age wonderment (what modern woman, especially with a fiancé as damp as Danny Huston, could resist so transcendent a love?) is the wrong one. And the working-out of the plot serves only to invalidate the treatment. It's almost as if no one had troubled to read the script all the way to the end. A number of serious actors, including Anne Heche, Peter Stormare, Arliss Howard, Alison Elliott, Cara Seymour, Ted Levine, and Lauren Bacall, are left looking pretty foolish. But there's no fun in it for anybody. The musical score by Alexandre Desplat, all by itself, would see to that, administering the aural equivalent of a Chinese water torture, with the flutes, the harps, the horns taking turns attacking our fortitude. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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