Hot from her triumphs in Moulin Rouge and The Others, as a sparkling but moribund courtesan-singer and a ghost-haunted lady of the manor respectively, Nicole Kidman reappears this week in a somewhat different role. Playing a Russian mail-order bride at least challenges her skills in acting without being able to say too much in English, but otherwise it doesn’t stretch her very far.
Birthday Girl is the story of a nebbishy bank clerk living in a British backwater who orders a Russian wife over the Internet. The clerk in question, John (he even has a nebbishy name), is played by Ben Chaplin, whom we saw so recently in the Sandra Bullock vehicle Murder by Numbers. Here he is in a better film, one with a smaller budget but more originality, though he is still in danger of being upstaged by his co-star.
It is, indeed, hard to play a character with no particular distinguishing features beyond his desperation for a mate and his naivety. Chaplin manages well, though, and the interplay with Kidman is convincing. He also has to show a man becoming less of a nebbish as life deals him a nasty hand, because, inevitably, his new bride is not all she appears to be, and when two vodka-quaffing Russian friends of hers (Matthieu Kassovitz and Vincent Cassel) turn up at John’s sedate suburban home things begin to fall apart.
The comedy of the situation is nicely judged by director Jez Butterworth and his brother Tom, with whom he wrote the script. The tone becomes a little wobbly as the comedy gets darker and John’s situation sours, but the sympathy the leads have established for their characters pulls it through. Birthday Girl does not stun one into submission like Moulin Rouge (to compare it to those other Kidman vehicles), and it does not bring one to the edge of one’s seat like The Others, but it does entertain. Pity its budget did not allow any visual innovation beyond dyeing Kidman’s hair black.