The Others (Amenábar, 2001)
Chris Forrester describes the magic of Nicole Kidman’s performances, particularly her star-defining string of films from 1995 to 2005.
One of the more remarkable decades in any recent performer’s career is Nicole Kidman’s turn-of-the-millennium output, a thrillingly versatile stretch of outings that took her from newly minted breakout star on the precipice of fame or flopdom to the vaunted realm of auteur muse. From 1995 — the year she proved simultaneous silver-screen seductiveness in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and chameleonic mettle in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For — through 2005, Kidman acted in 18 feature films and, irregardless of genre, quality, or filmmaker, turned out something enchanting each time, all the while amassing a number of collaborations with the more renowned filmmakers of the day: Van Sant, Schumacher, Jane Campion (The Portrait of a Lady, 1996), Griffin Dunne (better appreciated as actor than director, but maker of 1998’s Practical Magic nonetheless), Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, 2001), Lars von Trier (Dogville, 2003), Jonathan Glazer (Birth, 2004), Sydney Pollack (The Interpreter, 2005), and Nora Ephron (Bewitched, 2005).
The typical Kidman performance is hypnotic and fearless — both ferociously committed and absolutely intentional. It’s in the fire behind her glassy eyes in To Die For; her trembling, pale-faced hysteria in The Others (Amenábar, 2001); the tormented naivety of an exploited woman in Dogville; and always, it’s in the fierce, expressive qualities of her face, the piercing tone of her voice, the pure magnetism of her very presence that suggests a woman as born for the screen as any since Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe. Where all that seems rather obvious now, it took an embarrassingly long time for anyone in her vicinity to recognize they had a generational talent on their hands. Phillip Noyce came the closest with Dead Calm (1989), non-incidentally the film credited as her breakthrough, while others, it seems, often saw her as an empty beauty — even a cursory glance at the plots of her pre-’90s work show an actress boxed into romantic supporting roles. How revealing that it took a gay man to see that beauty as a tool rather than the sum total of her value.
To Die For isn’t, pound for pound, the finest Kidman performance, but it might be the most important — a firecracker of a turn in which the actress herself becomes, along with her character, a star, a magnet, an icon. There, she’s a smalltown girl with her eyes and heart set on (small)screen stardom, a desire so great she’ll do just about anything to make it hers. With maybe a bit less sexual manipulation and murderous deceit, one can sense in the actress playing her a ferocity all the same, belied by the startling ease with which the (American-born) Aussie actress transforms into a distinctly American psycho.
To Die For (Van Sant, 1995)
The typical Kidman role of this era generally follows the same trajectory, though it never comes close to feeling like a “type.” No, she’s the sexually self-assured (and emasculating) Alice in Eyes Wide Shut airing out the emotions of a then-fragmenting relationship, the devoutly religious mother of The Others cowering in the shadows of her dark and empty estate, Birth‘s grieving woman compelled to deeply uncomfortable places by belief and denial… But beneath them all, one senses the same electric vulnerability.
Beyond her work onscreen, a fair amount of Kidman’s excellence lies outside the edges of the frame. Much as her Eyes Wide Shut co-star and ex-husband Tom Cruise is often touted as his generation’s foremost actor-as-auteur, Kidman’s body of work is as remarkable for her fearless selection of projects as for the caliber of work she lent them. Consider, again, her decade-long run from 1995-2005, but focus this time on the filmmakers: a veritable murderer’s row of as many big-name talents as one could reasonably assemble in such time, interspersed with promising up-and-comers.
Films like The Others and Birth might feel like modern classics now, but in 2001 and 2004, their filmmakers were a pair of hotshot genre directors (and Radiohead collaborators, in the latter case) readying big swings: an English-language debut and a Kubrickian follow-up to a crime oddity. In each case, Kidman matches that gusto with an equal swing of her own, a knockout bolstered by incomparable poise. Birth is, yes, unforgettable, but arguably of greater interest here is The Others, a chilly contemporary ghost story of the Sixth Sense variety that’s come to occupy a near-canonized modern classic status thanks, in large part, to Kidman’s haunting central turn.
A riff on The Innocents (Clayton, 1961) that does away with the more memorable of that film’s maternal angsts and psychosexual frights, The Others works nonetheless because it finds in Kidman the only actress since Deborah Kerr who can fill its lead role with a similar degree of breathless intensity. There’s of course also the terrific photography by Javier Aguirresarobe that bathes the house and surrounding foggy moors in ambient eeriness, and the enigmatic screenplay by Amenábar whose twisting narrative yarn sparks its slow-burning dread and gives Kidman’s Grace psychological shape. But for all its memorable qualities, few facets of the film hold a candelabra to the pure, wide-eyed commitment of its lead performance.
The Others
One must consider also, in this era and beyond it, her steadfast support of women filmmakers — Mimi Leder, Nora Ephron, Kim Farrant, Sofia Coppola, Karyn Kusama, Halina Reijn, Lulu Wang, and particularly Jane Campion, whose In the Cut was her first producer credit — queer filmmakers — Schumacher, Van Sant, Amenábar, John Cameron Mitchell, and (sigh) Ryan Murphy — and fellow actors — Dunne, Frank Oz, Jason Bateman (another producer credit), Joel Edgerton — to all of whom her collaboration lent prestige and merit, in many cases to debuts and rising stars.
It’s true and unfortunate, then, that the quality of her output fizzles a bit post-Birth, and that few of her performances since have possessed the same awesome richness, but for that decade, she was a (portrait of a) lady on fire.
The Others screens at 10pm on September 27 as part of IU Cinema’s Friday Night Frights series. Companion to walk home with afterward and roommates’ approval for sleeping with the lights on recommended but not required.