Birthday Girl by Stephen Farber Attractive stars who crave respect often try to prove their acting chops by deglamorizing themselves. Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first to try this ploy when she played the blowsy Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and her example has inspired countless other glamour-pusses to go frumpy. Two more beautiful people labor to shed their glamorous auras in Birthday Girl. Ben Chaplin and Nicole Kidman play geeky and sleazy, respectively, in their lust after the laurels that have sometimes eluded them. Chaplin is cast as a colorless, recessive bank employee who sends away for a Russian mail-order bride. It's definitely a stretch to see the handsome Chaplin as a nerdy drone with secret S&M fetishes, but he does a good job of capturing the pathologically shy, insecure mannerisms of a social outsider. Kidman is equally adept at incarnating a scurvy Russian con artist, but neither performance is entirely convincing. We're a little too conscious of both actors slumming. Maybe the problem is that they're stuck in a shoddy vehicle--an uneasy mix of kooky romantic comedy and violent melodrama. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum.

Search Movieline!	home | forum | this month | reviews archive | features archive | back issues

© 2003 Movieline.com