One of Anne Heche's greatest performances can be found in "Birth" (2004), Jonathan Glazer's magnificently eerie drama about love, grief and the insidious power of suggestion. She enters the movie early, with long brown hair — a departure from the short blond cuts that had become a signature look — and a face that looks more tightly drawn, more sharply angled than usual. Her character, Clara, is cool and reserved, someone you might not immediately notice in a roomful of other demure, beige-coated Manhattanites. But then you catch her gaze, and Heche shows you a silent, unnerving glimpse of who Clara is: a bereaved lover, a glaring rival, a determined and vindictive agent of chaos.
It's not immediately clear what connection Clara has to this puzzler of a story, about a woman (Nicole Kidman) whose life is rocked by the apparent reincarnation of her late husband as a 10-year-old boy. Heche teases out the answer beautifully; she appears in only a handful of scenes, but she charges every one of them with mischief and menace, and the performance builds to a kicker of tremulous erotic perversity: "I would've explored this," Clara murmurs in the film's funniest and most disturbing line.
The greatness (some would say the folly) of "Birth" is that it treats a preposterous, often inexplicable situation with the utmost somberness and gravity, an aim that is both strengthened and slyly challenged by Heche's performance. More than the other characters, Clara is willing to take seriously — and yes, explore — the story's outrageous premise. But she's also the one who ultimately, firmly rejects it, with a cut-the-crap skepticism that Heche could do better than almost any other actor.
