This new movie Babygirl is so bad that I’ve now heard two different film podcasts try to argue it’s a comedy in disguise—presumably because the podcasters want to believe the giggles it induces are intentional rather than a form of cringe-inducing embarrassment on the part of the audience as it reacts to the sexual antics Nicole Kidman displays throughout as the movie’s star. For some reason, critics got it into their heads they were supposed to like Babygirl. This happens sometimes, especially when a movie portrays transgressive behavior and tries not to judge it—because, you know, we’re not supposed to judge anything any longer except white supremacy.
I have a college degree but didn’t continue after receiving my B.A., so perhaps I’m just not educated enough to understand what this movie is going for. It essentially asks this question: “What if Sheryl Sandberg wanted to be treated like a pet dog by a Zillennial 30 years her junior?”
Talk about leaning in!
Romy (Kidman) runs an advanced consumer robotics company—headquartered in the Garment Center in Manhattan, which, um, no. She is married to a fancy theater director played by Antonio Banderas, who must be hell to work for if you’re an actor getting notes from him because he whispers every single word he says, and you can’t hear a thing. They have two teenage daughters, and guess what, one of them is gay, because that’s the law now. Babygirl was written and directed by a Dutch filmmaker named Halina Reijn whose understanding of life in New York City is about as accurate as my sense that everyone in her native country wears wooden shoes and uses their thumb to plug holes in the dikes that sit next door to wooden windmills. The sheer falsity of the sociological details of Romy’s life matches the weird tone of every scene.
You’d think theirs is the perfect life, but Kidman is erotically unsatisfied and needs porn—though her husband thinks their sex life is great because she can’t tell him about her deep longing to be dominated. Then she sees a tall drink of water on a New York City street tame a snarling dog. And when she discovers this kid is actually working for her company as an intern, we’re pretty quickly off to the submission races.
The powerful woman is actually a masochist! The boy knows she wants to be told what to do, though how and why he discerns this is one of the many things the movie doesn’t bother to try and make us understand. “You know things about people,” Kidman’s Romy tells Samuel, who, I’m afraid, seems unable to speak a complete sentence. I know things about people too, and one of them is that inarticulate boys can’t, in fact, see through the glittering smooth surface of their very much older employer to see a “baby girl” underneath. That’s especially true when neither can we as we’re watching them interact. Kidman’s Romy makes no sense as a character, Samuel doesn’t have a character at all, and Banderas is too busy whispering to be a character.
In Babygirl, Kidman has returned to a theme that has run through her career since her breakthrough role in To Die For in 1995 and then onto the fiasco-that-people-keep-trying-to-claim-is-a-masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut to her Oscar-winning turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours and then through films you’ve probably never seen or even heard of, like Dogville and Birth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. That theme is: Wedlock is unfulfilling and drives women into despair, deviancy, longing, debasement, and even suicide. Usually, the only solution is a much younger man.
Twice in her career, Zac Efron has played that younger man—once in a completely deranged melodrama called The Paperboy in which we see her urinate on him to save him from a jellyfish bite and last year in a Netflix romcom called A Family Affair where they get it on even though he’s her daughter’s boss. She’s been at this for three decades. In To Die For, her character manipulates a starry-eyed teen into killing her husband. In Birth, a widow becomes convinced a 10-year-old boy who lives in her apartment building is the reincarnation of her husband. In Dogville, another little boy blackmails her into spanking him. Even if there’s not a kid involved, she’s happy to go places most actresses wouldn’t, as in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, in which her character agrees to pretend to be unconscious during coitus to satisfy her husband’s “sleeping beauty” fetish.
So OK, Nicole Kidman is basically a high-end Skinemax actress, and this movie might best be understood as a 1980s-90s erotic thriller viewed through the lens of a New York Times Style section piece about the rise of the cougar—Fatal Attraction meets Disclosure. What both those movies have in common with Babygirl, and what Kidman and her female Dutch director don’t seem to get is that in their effort to deal “fearlessly” (a word used in many favorable reviews) with the complexities of female desire, they have made the decade’s most deeply and unpleasantly misogynistic film.
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This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
