Walking into “Babygirl,” I had a set of assumptions. First, I expected it to be fun but not great. Second, I knew that — no matter what — Nicole Kidman would be a pleasure to watch as she always is. Third, I predicted that it would essentially amount to a slightly more highbrow “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Fourth, I imagined that it would be so sexy that it would accidentally be funny.
The first three of these assumptions proved correct. The fourth, however, was completely wrong. In fact, the opposite proved to be true. There’s comically little sex in this movie, which is allegedly about sex — there’s a lot more talk about BDSM than actual BDSM!
“Babygirl” was indeed fun, but not quite great. Romy (Nicole Kidman) is our protagonist, a high-powered tech CEO. Antonio Banderas plays Jacob, her husband, whose smothering love she finds irksome. Ultimately, Romy is driven into the arms of Samuel (Harris Dickinson) — an intern at her company many years her junior.
Banderas deserves a lot of credit for making the dramatic dynamic of this love triangle work. At the beginning of the movie, Romy has it all: an impressive job, a beautiful family, a stunning apartment, a seemingly abundant life. Why, then, throw it all away for an affair with a subordinate? Halina Reijn’s script and direction as well as Kidman’s acting offer some answers, but the reason I found most compelling lay in Banderas’s performance. Jacob appears loving. Nevertheless, the audience can detect frustration, resentment and impotence lurking beneath the surface.
I found Romy and Jacob’s two daughters wooden. They’re essentially set pieces for the main drama, comically unlike real adolescents. At one point, Isabel (the older daughter) has a birthday party — it looked more like B-roll from a medication commercial than any high school party I ever went to. Nora (the younger daughter) is ditzy and preoccupied with dance, and provides Reijn a chance to splice footage of her practicing the tarantella with scenes from Romy’s romance — it’s A24-core cinematography at its cheesiest.
Still, I liked Romy’s assistant and protege Esme (Sophie Wilde). In a smart bit of writing, Esme — who idolizes Romy as a role model for women in business — discovers Romy’s affair with Samuel and, rather than exposing it, cynically uses it to blackmail her into being a better feminist icon! It was a nice pot shot at HR ideology, a fable demonstrating that the “girlboss” image can be just as oppressive as it is liberating.
Dickinson didn’t wow me as Jacob. He’s charming, of course, but he didn’t sell me on his character. He shot for mystery and complexity and instead wound up with a performance that was vague and confused. A British actor, his American accent isn’t up to par either. He talks like he’s got peanut butter in his mouth.
It almost goes without saying that Kidman killed it as Romy. There’s a lot going on in Reijn’s script, and Kidman is able to capture a ton of it in her measured, numinous acting. She and Dickinson have romantic chemistry, but it’s not the stereotypical dynamic one expects from this sort of movie. It’s not particularly lovey-dovey, or even steamy, but it’s fun to watch in a unique way.
The end result is basically a spruced up “50 Shades of Grey.” In general, “Babygirl” is more restrained — i.e., less explicit — than its forerunner. There are also occasional allusions to “Eyes Wide Shut” for the Kubrick and Kidman fans. All in all, it is worth seeing for its fresh writing, interesting performances and sexual melodrama, but it probably won’t warrant a rewatch.
