Babygirl (2024)
One of the reviews of this film we glanced at made an excellent point. So pardon us while we borrow it.......
The point - that every decade or so, some filmmaker takes it upon themselves to rock the zeitgeist with a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners sexually charged drama.
By sexually charged, we're talkin' 'bout fearless stars stripping down for many, many bouts of the horizontal mambo. The kinkier, the better.
Never one to back down from a challenging role, here comes Nicole Kidman stepping up to the plate. Let the moaning and gasping commence.
Kidman plays Romy,a high powered robotics company CEO whose broken through the glass ceiling of female empowered achievements. She lives her best 1 percenter life with her stage director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderes) and their two young daughters.
But her craving to be sexually dominated isn't in hubby's playbook, forcing her into masturbation via porn to ring her own bell.
Not for long though.
Along comes hunka-hunka studmuffin Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of Kidman's young company interns who chooses her as his mentor. Sparks do fly, because Samuel prefers dominating Romy like the '50 Shades of Whatever' guy, which naturally is an orgasmic dream come true for her.
As anyone who's seen one of these overheated fandangos could predict, Romy's sexual adventures collide with her family life, sending Jacob into a panic attack. (And let's now salute Banderas for making the best out of the most thankless role an actor can endure in a hump-a-thon, the clueless cuckold.)
Writer-director Halin Reign does aspire to higher goals here, underling the irony of Kidman's character......a woman torn between her drive to climb to the heights of corporate power while starving to fulfill her own particular sexual satisfaction.
But there's barely a sign of a pulse in Reign's inert, culture-vulture indie film self satisfaction. And boytoy Dickinson (supposedly the next big thing in up-and-coming actors) looks to us like a generic, dead-eyed non entity. (Who knows, maybe he'll prove us wrong with his next project.)
The one and only redeeming factor here (and the only reason we sat through this).....Kidman of course, one of the most emotionally expressive movie stars at work today. By the time this movie lurched to its ending, we hated it for taking cruel advantage of Kidman's willingness to bravely inhabit any role she takes on.
A film utterly unworthy of its lead actor.1& 1/2 stars (*1/2)
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