There's good news and bad news about In the Cut, both on and off the screen.  Good news: The swelling in Meg Ryan's lips looks like it has subsided a bit in the film.  Bad news: In real life, they've been re-inflated and are as big as monster truck tires.  More good news: Cut is a beautiful arthouse picture, with production values you may not see topped all year.  More bad news: The story is a by-the-numbers murder-mystery that had the press hissing in Toronto, where Cut had its gala premiere.

Cut, based on Susanna Moore's 1995 novel, stars Ryan (Kate & Leopold) as Frannie Avery, a dowdy high school English teacher who hides behind drab clothes and shoulder-length mousy brown hair.  Her best and apparently only friend is half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Road to Perdition), who shares Frannie's sad Manhattan existence and promiscuous father (Pauline may be a stripper, too, but that's never made clear).

One day, while looking for the bathroom in the basement of a neighborhood bar, Frannie accidentally witnesses a guy getting a hummer in the shadows.  She doesn't exactly look away, and she manages to notice a tattoo on the guy's hand, as well as the woman's blue fingernails.  Enter police detective James A. Malloy (Mark Ruffalo, My Life Without Me), who, a few days later, knocks on Frannie's door with some routine questions about a recent string of murders in the area. The latest victim has the same fingernails as the bar blower...and the cop has the same tattoo as the blowee.

Though this seems quite odd and upsetting to Frannie, it doesn't stop her from succumbing to Malloy's sexual advances fairly easily.  Before long, he's eating her ass and coaching her how to use those puffy lips on him, and she's fingering herself while daydreaming about their next steamy encounter.  Oh, but there's still a killer loose.  And the suspect list includes one of Frannie's students (Sharrieff Pugh), who happens to be obsessed with serial killings, and her med student-turned-stalker ex-boyfriend (Kevin Bacon), who certainly comes off as being psycho enough to decapitate several women.

I'm sure most of the buzz you've heard about Cut revolves around Ryan and the film's sex scenes.  They're pretty graphic (this time, Ryan's fake orgasms aren't confined to a deli booth) but are artistically shot – a la Unfaithful – by director Jane Campion and last year's Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dion Beebe (Chicago).  The sex also plays a little desperate, both for Frannie and Ryan, with the latter seemingly doing whatever she can to escape that pixie persona of hers.  And if that means unfurling your 42-year-old boobs in front of the camera so we forget about You've Got Mail, then you go, girl!

Actually, all of Cut is shot (and edited) rather stylishly, but it seems like such a waste when the film's story is, aside from being quite dark, so run-of-the-mill.  The wishy-washiness of Ryan's character doesn't help, either.  Campion's last three films (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady and Holy Smoke) featured strong performances from powerful actresses (Holly Hunter, Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet have eight Oscar nominations and two wins between them) cast in robust roles.  You won't find any of that here, which seems rather odd once you notice the sheer volume of female names in the closing credits.  It's one thing for a guy to make a film about a frustrated, incomplete woman who finally wakes up when a guy gives it to her real good.  It's something else (read: disappointing) when someone like Campion does it, too.

On the plus side, Ruffalo has never been better.  I know a couple of police detectives, and his performance was more authentic than just about anything else I've seen so far this year.  It's a shame everyone will be too busy focusing on Meg's boobs to notice him.

1:53 -

for strong sexuality including explicit dialogue, nudity, graphic crime scenes and language