Halle Berry's dubious artistic ascension following her abysmal turn in "Monster's Ball" gave rise to this critical phenomenon. Facile skin-bearing was mistaken for what "Inside the Actors' Studio" host James Lipton would call, "naked, raw emotional honesty."
Curiously, Berry used her newfound credibility as a thespian to obtain key roles in the James Bond and "Catwoman" franchises, leading a naysayer like myself to question why she received such obsequious praise for her Oscar-winning performance in the first place.
Such a fate will not befall Meg Ryan, formerly the token sweetheart in American romantic comedies. Last year, Ryan went topless and full frontal — sorry, I meant to say, bared her soul — in director Jane Campion's serial killer tease "In the Cut."
Even though advance press about Ryan's nude scenes sullied the project from the start, it seemed like a potentially fruitful star-director match. Known for her onset penchant toward unclothing herself to comfort her exposed actresses, Campion previously disrobed Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet to varying success.
Campion even enlisted the fantastic Mark Ruffalo ("You Can Count On Me") and Jennifer Jason Leigh to help Ryan make the transition from typecast romantic-comedy costar into complex character actor.
With these promising credentials in place, why did "In the Cut" fail to carry Ryan into more dramatic territory?
Most of the blame lies in the film's subject matter, demanding thematic material for any actress to play against, let alone one accustomed to likable, if not weightless love stories.
Ryan portrays Frannie, a bookish, sexually repressed high school English teacher who becomes involved with a homicide detective (Ruffalo) investigating a series of grisly murders in her New York City neighborhood.
While the cop's erotic advances unleash feelings of passion and sensuality in Frannie, she suspects he may be responsible for the unspeakable crimes himself.
Leigh is Frannie's flirtatious stepsister, Pauline, a scatterbrained confidant who pouts her way through dreary, longwinded scenes with Ryan.
The plot is not concerned with police procedural, sisterly relationships or Frannie's burgeoning sexuality. In lieu of drawing on romantic or thriller conventions, Campion and her screenwriter, Susanna Moore (on whose book the film is based), have a nearly didactic agenda on mind.
In Frannie's environmental and ethical universe, male and female stereotypes border on gratuitous hyperbole: Women are needy, sensitive, intelligent, yearning creatures and men are uniformly crude, homophobic, brutish and, in the case of one of Frannie's ex-boyfriends (an oddly cast, un-credited Kevin Bacon), delusional and schizophrenic. Marriage, a topic mentioned and opined about by every lead character, similarly receives an unwarranted level of disdain.
Campion's filmmaking is very polished. The camera reverberates with ill ease, rarely settling on a static shot to accompany Frannie's emotional uncertainty.
The acting is not as bracing as Campion's direction — no one, least of all Ryan, is very comfortable or convincing in his or her role. Bacon's twitchy appearance, along with serving as an obvious red herring, adds some unintentional gallows humor.
Despite its theatrical failure, the "In the Cut" DVD includes a few extras. On a commentary track, Campion and producer Laurie Parker pontificate about the film's metaphorical significance, all of which is silly at times.
There is also a making-of feature, a trailer and, strangely, a "slang dictionary."
Ryan's attempt to move beyond her screen persona is admirable, yet it was at the service of Campion's misconceived genre-exercise. Maybe "In the Cut's" only lamentable value will be the nude still frames that are likely to elate subscribers to celebrity naked sites in the years to come.
"In the Cut": C
DVD Features: C