MOVIE REVIEW : Weirdness Is Cornerstone of the ‘Cement Garden’

Most movies are so bland that occasionally the sheer differentness of a plot, an idea, a character can count for a lot. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes weirdness is just weirdness. “The Cement Garden,” adapted from the 1978 Ian McEwan novel, certainly gets points for being different, but is it good?

The film (at the Nuart) opens with the kind of ghastly dysfunctional family dinner scene that immediately deposits us in Weirdsville. Jack (Andrew Robertson) is a surly, languid, pimply 15-year-old. His eldest sister Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is combative. Their younger sister and brother, Sue (Alice Coultard) and Tom (Ned Birkin), seem normal until the plot kicks in. (Tom, for example, enjoys dressing up as a girl and wearing wigs to dinner.)

Their parents, played by Hanns Zischler and Sinead Cusack, are a classic mismatch: He’s a martinet, she’s an earth-mother realist. They live in a block-like building in the middle of nowhere on the rubbishy outskirts of London. When Father wants to cement over their garden, Jack discovers the joys of masturbation. His climax coincides with Father’s collapse from a heart attack.

And so it goes.

McEwan’s novel was celebrated for its matter-of-fact surrealism and the film, written and directed by Andrew Birkin, manages to capture McEwan’s air of nightmare plausibility. But it’s a coy, drab, chuckling nightmare . When the four kids also lose their mother, they contrive a cement coffin in the cellar and proceed to play out their oddest tendencies. Jack, who is priapic toward Julie in a dreamy, disconnected way, spends most of his time circling around her seductions. (She snipes at him, then asks him to rub her back with suntan lotion.) When she takes up with a rich, sporty twit (Jochen Horst), Jack’s distress becomes painfully comic. Jealousy makes him industrious.

Birkin at least has the good sense to let this material play itself out without winking at the audience. He understands the demented complacency at the heart of McEwan’s particular madness. A few of the performances, notably from Cusack and Gainsbourg (whose French accent, amazingly, is nowhere to be heard), are inspired.

But the direction isn’t. Too often the matter-of-fact nuttiness is just blah. Cocteau and Polanski and Bunuel worked with similar material and managed to make their movies hair-raising without losing their cool. With Birkin, cool is just about all there is. His straight face is encased in cement.

‘The Cement Garden’ Andrew Robertson: Jack Charlotte Gainsbourg: Julie Alice Coultard: Sue Sinead Cusack: Mother

An October Films release. Director Andrew Birkin. Producers Bee Gilbert, Ene Vanaveski. Screenplay by Andrew Birkin, based on the novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematographer Stephen Blackman. Editors Brian Sinclair, Jonathan Rudd. Costumes Anne Laflin. Music Edward Shearmer. Production design Bernd Lepel. Art director Amanda Grenville. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

*

MPAA rating: Unrated. Times guidelines: includes incest and other sexual situations, scenes of death and dying.