Would you marry a woman in this situation? Good luck to you, because there will be three persons in the bed for a long time. This doesn't bother Joseph (Danny Huston), who is either so in love with Anna that he's willing to put up not only with her grieving but with her declaration that she is now in love with a ten-year-old. Maybe it's the money Anna inherited, perhaps through her mother, Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), which enables her to live with mom in a duplex that appears to be on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, the same sort of pad where Jackie Kennedy Onassis during her final years. When little Sean professes his love for a woman twenty-seven years his senior, well, OK, kids say the darndest things. But would a member of the social register, obviously intelligent and with far more experience with the world, be so much taken in by the boy's story that in front of her fianc‚ she insists that she loves Sean and then, even takes a bath with him?

"Birth," then, is a movie that does not set the proper tone. If this were a supernatural thriller or mystery, we can accept reincarnation. As a story about normal, overly rich New Yorkers, the plot lacks credibility. There are some fine supporting roles, including one by Arliss Howard as Bob, a doctor who tries to get to the bottom of the mystery but is unable to; by Lauren Bacall, who is the one person with a sense of wit and irony, who says while dishing out a piece of cake for the lad, "Are you enjoying your cake, Mr. Reincarnation?"; and by Anne Heche as one of Anna's friends, a woman who toward the conclusion of the story thinks she knows whether little Sean is a fake or not. On the whole, "Birth," despite the absurdity of a movie that is not offered to us as a spooky reincarnation drama, is entertaining enough despite some unintentional laughs we'll deliver at these denizens of Central Park.