Selections from Nicole Kidman's filmography that demonstrate her extraordinary talent and risk-taking commitment.
Choosing a favorite Nicole Kidman performance is nearly impossible, as she's gifted us with so many memorable roles. The same goes for trying to select her best-ever performance - where does one begin? Certainly, though, her work as Suzanne Stone Maretto in Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995) is as excellent a place to start as any. Suzanne might well be my favorite Kidman performance and the one I'd rank atop her best-of list.
In a story of small-town ambition gone wildly off the rails - with a cracking script from Buck Henry and loosely based on the Pamela Smart story that electrified American media a few years before - Kidman is an aspiring television news journalist in New Hampshire who may lack experience but makes up for it with a maniacally relentless drive for fame and fortune. Married to a local Italian restauranteur's simple and old fashioned son Larry (Matt Dillon), she talks her way into a job doing the weather at a tiny local news operation.
Suzanne, never shy about dispensing with her casual racism or classicism, clearly looks down upon her husband and his "guinea" family. Larry's sister Janice, in a heartbreakingly good supporting performance by Illeana Douglas, is instantly leery of the Suzanne's preening careerism. It isn't long before she's made friends with some troubled high school outcasts played by Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, and Allison Folland. Soon enough she manipulates them - with attention, drugs, and sex - into killing the person she views as most responsible for her failure to reach the big-time: her husband.
As Suzanne, Kidman gives one of the most ferocious performances of the decade. She rightly won the Golden Globe that year, blowing away the competition with a searing, committed performance that impresses as much or more when viewed today, through the prism of her career up to this point. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle accurately noted, "Kidman lets you see the calculation, the wheels turning, the transparent efforts to charm that succeed in charming all the same ... her beauty and magnetism are electric. Undeniably she belongs on camera, which means it's equally undeniable that Suzanne belongs on camera. That in itself is an irony, a commentary or both."
Kidman's beauty in the film is practically impossible to believe. She's jaw-dropping in one perfectly fitted suit or skirt after another, making it clear why these troubled children would fall under her prey when she starts lavishing them with attention, and also why her husband is so enamored with her from the moment he first sees her. Several times throughout, Suzanne sips seductively from a drinking straw as an obvious means of seduction. Kidman's attractiveness is played up to the hilt to express Suzanne's willingness to use her body to get where she wants to go by doing whatever - or whomever - it takes to get there.
In Nicole Kidman: Anatomy of an Actor (Tylski, Cahiers du Cinema, 2016), Alexandre Tylski says, "To Die For arrived at just the right time for Kidman." For several years in the early 1990s, "the actress had been settling for unambitious roles, playing characters whose existence is strictly determined by the men around her." Teaming with a hot director - Van Sant had already made two bona fide 1990s classics with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho - Kidman found the part she needed to take charge of her career. In many ways, To Die For is the template that she has returned to frequently ever since, consistently playing complex women in challenging films made by auteur directors. Much of what we know and think of Kidman today was shaped by her incendiary performance in To Die For. She reached for the stars with this role, and in so doing became the star we know her to be today.
This movie is a bonafide classic. Great post.
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