A CEO struggles with her sexual desires

   Nicole Kidman has never been timid about her acting choices. She has worked with directors who know how to push limits, notably Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut), Lars von Trier (Dogville), and Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer. 

   Kidman takes another risk in Babygirl, an erotic thriller about a highly successful woman who has spent most of her life suppressing her darker sexual desires (her description not mine).    

    Long before we meet her, Kidman's Romy has climbed to the top of the corporate ladder: She's the CEO of Tensile, a company that makes robots that replace human laborers in the nation's warehouses. She's won the trifecta of contemporary happiness: corporate power, a loving husband (Antonio Banderas), and two great daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly). 

    So where's the risk in what sounds like a showcase for affluence and achievement? Romy’s bedroom life has stagnated; she may dominate in the boardroom but she wants to be dominated in the bedroom. 

   We know that Romy is sexually unfulfilled because the movie begins with a prologue in which she has sex with her husband, whose tastes are ... well .... conventional. They finish. He falls asleep. She races to another room to masturbate while watching porn on her laptop. She muffles sounds of ecstasy, but what's sex without the danger of discovery?

    Such is the beginning of a story that revolves around Romy's improbable affair with an obnoxiously confident intern (Harris Dickinson) at her company. Exposure could derail Romy's career, ruin her marriage, and alienate her daughters, precisely the sense of danger she needs to charge her psycho-sexual batteries. 

   Kidman captures Romy’s uneasiness about surrendering to Samuel's demands. She fights a battle with herself, unsure how far she wants to go with a brash young control freak.

   And, yes, it's difficult to believe that a corporate leader would tolerate Samuel’s aggressively inappropriate office behavior. 

   Romy first notices Samuel when he calms a wild dog during a street encounter in front of Romy's office building. What better sexual partner than someone who knows how to control unruly animal impulses? 

    For his part, Dickenon's Samuel is happy to boss the boss around in scenes that include ordering a naked Romy to kneel on fall fours, lick milk from a saucer, and other things that you may not want to try at home.

    While you're attempting to understand Romy, consider Samuel. What makes this guy tick? He talks about needing consent before proceeding in a sexual relationship with Romy, but he often comes across as a manipulative jerk. Maybe he exists only to trigger Romy's sexual revolution. 

     Dutch-born writer/director Halina Rejin gives her movie a high-gloss veneer that allows her to slide across issues of power, age difference, and the desires Romy has avoided, perhaps because she considers it unbecoming for a summa cum laude graduate of Yale with an impeccable resume.

   For quite a while, Babygirl plays like a movie that may have drawn inspiration from predecessors such as Fatal Attraction, but Rejin charts a cause in which Romy must learn to accept herself, "dark" eroticism included. It may sound glib, but Babygirl's story arc might hinge on Romy's transition from faked orgasms to the real thing.

    Put another way, the movie seems less interested in psychological depth than situational tension, putting Romy in a position some will see as more demeaning than liberating. The screenplay takes a sober turn in its third act, but, at least for me, Babygirl already had sacrificed too much credibility to dig its way out.

   And for all its supposed daring, Babygirl can’t transcend a contrived, soft-core feel. Put another way, this isn't Last Tango in the Boardroom.

     Rejin’s choice of jobs for Romy proves telling. Making her a CEO may have been influenced by the need to show her as a woman with power. Can an acclaimed executive wield power in the daytime while abandoning it at night? That might have been more intriguing had Rejin’s movie been less surface-oriented. 

     Initially, Romy meets Samuel in a hotel of his choosing; it’s too down-scale for her tastes. She may be willing to submit to his sexual orders. but damn if she doesn’t pick a better hotel for their future assignations. Perhaps one has limits, after all.

 

     

Tragedy stalks a wrestling family

 When I was a kid, I'd occasionally watch professional wrestling. But it never held my interest for long because it was a) grotesque b) staged and c) melodramatic. 

  Also, my mother would sometimes insist on a channel change. 

  "Why is that 'junk' blaring on the TV? Read a book.”

  The Iron Claw, a movie set in the world of professional wrestling, takes place in the 1970s and 1980s, long after I had even a minimal interest in pro wrestling. Thankfully director Sean Durkin (Marcy May Marlene) isn't only preaching to the pro-wrestling choir. 

  Durkins brings plenty of indie spirit to the story of the Von Erich family, a fabled bunch of professional wrestlers. He gives the movie focus by concentrating on the father/son relationship between Kevin Von Erich (an almost unrecognizable Zac Efron) and his tyrannical father (Holt McCallany).

    Kevin's three brothers (Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White, and Stanley Simons) play important roles in creating the pressured environment in which these young men struggle toward maturity.

    All of the brothers wrestle. Even Simons's Mike, who prefers music and plays in a band, picks up the wrestling shield when others have fallen.

    Efron excels as Kevin, who for a time, is passed over in the family's quest to capture a championship belt. Nothing drives McCallany's Fritz, who wrestled during the 1960s, more than being top dog.  Fritz loves his kids but he has a touch of the Great Santini in him. He pushes, goads, and insists that the brothers meet his standards of toughness.

    The brothers mostly defer to Dad's judgments, and the relationships between the siblings are depicted as competitive yet caring.

    Kevin broods about being passed over in favor his brothers before getting his shot at the big time, but he doesn't undermine them. Although these young men have been taught to regard themselves as members of a family business, we get to know each of them as individuals.

   Dickinson's Davis seems like the only brother who's having fun in the ring. He’s the guy for whom things come easily. Kevin sweats; Davis glides.

  White's Kerry is infected by intensity, a counterpoint to Mike’s conflicted nature.

   As he tells the story of the Von Erich tribe, Durkin finds dark currents. The family believes it has been cursed. The oldest Von Erich brother died when he was a child. Since then, the brothers have been looking over their shoulders for the shadow of the reaper.

       Questions of danger loom because of injuries, accidents, and a father's unremitting mind-set, which he justifies as necessary if his sons are to achieve the goal he imposes on them. He even ranks his sons, although he acknowledges that the rankings can change according to performance.

   Softer moments occur when Kevin falls for the woman (Lily James) who will become his wife, the first glimmer that some of life's rewards might not require climbing into the ring or tossing someone out of it.

    If you're looking for a movie full of sports triumphs, The Iron Claw may disappoint. You'll more likely remember the movie as the tragic story of a family that found heartbreak in its single-minded pursuit of ring renown. 

   If you research the Von Erichs, you'll learn that Durkin omitted mention of Chris, a sixth son. Maybe purists will care. I wondered about it, but moved on.

   I don't want to oversell The Iron Claw, but there's good reason to acknowledge its strengths, including Efron's performance.  He gives the movie its wounded soul. 

   Kevin may not be the best of the Von Erich wrestlers, but he's sincere and eventually he learns that living under dictatorial rule isn't satisfying -- even if the dictator happens to be your father.

 

These crawdads sing a lukewarm song

 

    Sometimes I wonder whether there’s anything left to American culture aside from rampant eclecticism. Where the Crawdads Sing, the big-screen adaptation of a best-selling novel by Delia Owens, reaches theaters as an amalgam of storylines and genre gestures.

    In its early going, the movie resembles a Nicholas Sparks romance between an isolated girl and a well-meaning young man. At other times, the movie offers a lyrical appreciation of the North Carolina marshland where much of the story takes place. At still other times, Crawdads relies on a woman's determination to secure her place in the world.

   If all that weren’t enough, the story is interspersed with a courtroom drama in which a country lawyer sheds his retirement to defend the main character in a murder trial that grips the fictional town of Barkley Cove, N.C.

    To work at all, the movie requires an actress who can convey the independence and natural intelligence of its main character.

    Daisy Edgar-Jones more than passes the test: She plays Kya, a young woman who lives alone in the marshlands just outside of town. Edgar-Jones captures the wariness and guile of a woman who has grown accustomed to reading nature’s tea leaves. Kya's a natural naturalist.  

  Abandoned by her mother, father, and siblings, Kya relies on the marsh to teach her how to survive in the world as she finds it during the 1950s and 60s.

    Director Olivia Newman presents the scenes between Kya and her first love Tate (Taylor John Smith) in too-good-to-be-true territory  until Tate goes off  to college and breaks his promise to return to Kya.

   Time passes and Kya takes up with Chase (Harris Dickinson), a young man who looks a lot like Tate but who once was a star high school football player. He regards himself as a town hotshot. Not surprisingly, he's a jerk.

    Kya narrates the movie, early on telling her story to her attorney (a sympathetic David Strathairn). She continues narrating without any specified listener other than the film’s audience.

     With help from cinematographer Polly Morgan, Newman conveys an appreciation for the swamplands, the visual equivalent of the observant quality that helped give Owens’s novel its weight.

      Aside from the two men in Kya’s life, supporting roles include Garret Dillahunt as Kya’s abusive father and a Black couple (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt) who  provide Kya with clothes. She trades the muscles that she harvests for grits and other staples.

      Though set during the days of segregation, the movie keeps racial issues at arm's length, preferring to show how Kya — whom the townsfolk derisively refer to as Marsh Girl — develops as a first-rate illustrator and chronicler of the marsh life that she observes.

       Shifts between courtroom scenes and various chapters in Kya’s life burden the movie. Just as we're getting into one part of the movie, another pops up.

     Produced by Reese Witherspoon, who has taken a major interest in the work of women filmmakers and in women’s subjects, the film should satisfy devotees of the novel

      But unlike its celebrated marshlands, the movie can come across as dry, more a recitation of the novel's events than a deeply felt drama.

     Credit Edgar-Jones for carrying the story through its various stages, but Crawdad’s use of narration provides a clue as to why the movie  doesn’t always work: Where the Crawdads Sing is more a story told than one that lives, breathes and finds its own life.