Sodom On The Hudson

Rating: 10/10 (17 November 2006)

Anyone else play with the name "Ira Levin" and come up with "Evil Rain"?
"Rosemarie's Baby" is so clever and audacious a film, it makes you want to come up with your own twists on its tightly-knotted storyline, a tale of a young woman named Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) who finds her idyllic Manhattan lifestyle shaken by a series of strange goings-on, not least of which involves her expected baby. Director Roman Polanski channels the best of Hitchcock and French New Wave cinema to come up with a new, ever-so-perverse, retelling of the Greatest Story Ever Told.
That Rosemarie's baby has something to do with Evil Incarnate is what everyone knows about this film going in. But as so many reviewers here note quite well, the film is not your conventional horror flick, but something quite different, that uses atmosphere and mood to weave an eerie spell to stay with you long after the film is over.
Seeing the film once is enough, but seeing it again really brings out the humor and pathos in this strange tale. Lines like the one Rosemarie says to her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), when she feels her baby kicking and notices he's shy about putting his hand on her belly: "Don't be scared, it won't bite." Or the strange girl Rosemary meets in the laundry room of the "Black Bram," full of gratitude to the couple that took her in. "Real grandparents," the girl calls them. "They picked me up off the sidewalk." The sidewalk is where she ends up, though, a few minutes later, one of the first signs something's wrong.
Minutely faithful to Ira Levin's novel, Polanski nevertheless frames his film in such an imaginative way as to make it feel alive, and thus more chilling as it goes on, with its attention to Upper East Side decor, summer dresses that resemble paisley sofa covers, and of course the baroque architecture of the Bramford, i.e. the real-life Dakota apartments, whose own unhappy history give this film a guilty kick.
That's too bad, because the film would stand up as well without any tragic real-life subtext. Farrow's performance (shades of Jean Seberg) is an amazing display of an actress in complete control as her character spins farther out of it. Though she was deprived of so much as an Oscar nomination (at least the Golden Globes weren't as asleep at the wheel), Ruth Gordon did win an Oscar playing a neighbor whose amiable kookiness conceals nasty depth, the best of a supporting cast that doesn't miss a trick, whether it be Ralph Bellamy as an unorthodox obstetrician or Elisha Cook as a fey doorman.
The only performance many have caveats about is Cassavetes. Would not Robert Redford had worked better in the role of the struggling, amoral actor? Yet I find myself liking Cassavetes better the more I watch this film, his guilty laughter as he urges Rosemary to finish her chocolate "mouse" and wear her smelly charm. He really nails a deeper sense of evil on offer, with his callous comments to Rosemary and his nasty way with a joke, at peace with a world that can ask, on the cover of Time magazine: "Is God Dead?" Existential dread is at the heart of this film, and Guy presents a post-Christian figure that Cassavetes nails down from beginning to end.
Polanski and Farrow give the best work. He frames every shot with the kind of depth and focus that reminds you of Hitchcock at his peak, while she, eerily resembling Twiggy, sets a standard for '60s glamour and acting prowess that makes you wonder how she failed to find worthy projects in the next decade. It wasn't really until the 1980s, as Woody Allen's muse, that she had the opportunity to develop a real body of work. It's like this film had some kind of curse on it.
Of course, talking about curses and "Rosemary's Baby" makes you realize Mia got off rather lightly in comparison. My random music machine just played selections from John Lennon and Frank Sinatra in tandem, and now I really have the creeps. So will you, when you give this a chance. Creepiness is a harder trick to pull off in movies than raw shock, and here is a film that sets a standard few, if any, have come close to matching.