'Birth' easy on eyes, yet hard to fathom

Nicole Kidman, her hair cropped into a Mia Farrow-style helmet, plays Anna, a wealthy young widow on Manhattan's Upper West Wide. In the film's spectral opening sequence, we've seen her husband, Sean, collapse while jogging in Central Park, and now, two years later, she's engaged to Joseph (Danny Huston), an aggressively confident Master of the Universe type. Kidman moves through this film as though underwater; Anna is so dazed with grief, she's more Joseph's personal reclamation project than his fiance.

At a birthday celebration for Anna's mother Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), a young boy (Cameron Bright) suddenly appears. His name is Sean, too, and he claims to be Anna's husband. He has details of their life together, he's 10 years old, and he's extremely serious. Naturally, Anna falls in love with him.

Oh, at first the family frogmarches the kid back to Williamsburg, and there's some hand-wringing on the part of Sean's parents, lumpy Brooklyn types played by Ted Levine and Cara Seymour. But the sleek Manhattanites take it pretty seriously, down to Anna's brother-in-law (Arliss Howard) testing Sean's knowledge as if he were administering the PSATs. Joseph is appalled at this development but pastes on a diplomatic smile, Anna's friend Clara (Anne Heche) twitches and stews, and Anna herself appears to have been hit on the head with a 2-by-4. Bacall looks as if she needs a stiff drink.

Glazer paces the film like a dirge: I can't remember a slower, quieter, more winterbound major release. Yet "Birth" keeps you hooked longer than it ought to, thanks to the skill with which the director and his team put it together.

The cinematographer is Gus Van Sant's gifted cameraman Harris Savides, who doesn't let a glimmer of sunlight into the film; composer Alexandre Desplat contributes a score that lands somewhere to the right of Steve Reich and gets away with breaking the cardinal rule of film music (if you notice it, it's bad).

The film as a whole is a thing of ambiguous, painterly moods, itself unusual enough to attend to while you're waiting for something, anything to happen.