You can keep this ‘Babygirl’ in a corner
This isn’t your standard movie review.
Confession up front: I didn’t make it through Babygirl, so this won’t be a standard review. Halena Reijn’s movie started out as something potentially different for an awards season release. Nicole Kidman turning up the raunch factor with a hint of sophistication as a powerful corporate boss who finds herself suddenly inside the palm of her intern’s hand.
Two attempts and around an hour into the about two hour film, I gave up. Movies that come out during voting season don’t always get the complete treatment; it’s considering more than finishing every movie. This was one that got dropped due to frustration with the plot and where things could go.
Kidman and co-star Harris Dickenson do their best, but Reijn’s script is a mess of misdirection, at least for half of the running time. I could get back to it and finish it. The review could evolve. Recently, I finished the latest Mission: Impossible movie and liked it a lot more than the first viewing. Then again, I don’t see myself revisiting Babygirl a second time. It had little to offer.
If you want to watch a woman break bad out of her marriage and actually run into some stakes, watch Diane Lane turn up the heat with Oliver Martinez in Unfaithful. Richard Gere gets involved as the husband, but you could see how she could lean towards Martinez. You can’t for one second understand why Kidman’s high-powered executive cheats on Antonio Banderas with the squirrelly Dickinson. His Samuel coerces his boss with reclusive tactics that make her pursue him, but it’s never attractive to watch.
No offense to the folks who enjoy an extra kink in their bedroom dance, but making a woman crawl on her knees and doing all kinds of weird shit with your hands won’t turn on a light in an appliance store. You keep wanting some Fifty Shades of Grey action to apply some medium heat at the very least, but Babygirl doesn’t produce that.
Maybe it happened in the second hour. Maybe it didn’t. I bounced. This review won’t get posted on Rotten Tomatoes due to the lack of film completion, but I can tell you to watch Unfaithful. It was better, offered hot sex and good thrills, and didn’t leave you uninterested after an hour.