Destroyer
DestrOYer i Karyn Kusama takes Nicole Kidman into the darkest terrain of her career…
Nicole Kidman goes into noir mode.
Age cannot wither her,” wrote Shakespeare. He obviously wasn’t thinking of the LAPD’s Erin Bell, the worn-out detective at the heart of Karyn Kusama’s nihilistic new crime drama, Destroyer. Played by Nicole Kidman – truly as you’ve never seen her before – Bell is a broken woman. Alcoholism has taken its toll, with her sallow skin pock-marked with liver-spots, her teeth yellowing and blue eyes now bleary.
“If you really think about it, time isn’t kind to all of us,” reasons Kusama, when Teasers sits down with the 50-year-old filmmaker of Girlfight and Jennifer’s Body. “There are often reasons for it, but it’s not typical that we ask: ‘How did you get here?’ Lots of people tell her she looks terrible but no one asks why. That’s the world we
live in: happy to comment on what you look like but not really delve into how you got there.”
Bell’s current state is just one of the mysteries at the heart of Destroyer, a film that flashes back to 17 years earlier when she was a fresh-faced rookie placed undercover in a California gang. When the outfit’s violent but charismatic leader Silas re-emerges, it forces the ageing Bell to confront her past. “I think we were really interested in the idea of someone investigating themselves, in a very literal sense,” explains co-writer (and Kusama’s real-life husband) Phil Hay.
To explain too much more would see Teasers arrested for trespassing on spoiler territory, but suffice it to say, Hay’s script – penned with his regular partner Matt Manfredi – is as slippery as Christopher Nolan’s classic Memento. Not least because Kidman’s Bell is far removed from the typical bad boy cops, from Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant
to Gary Oldman in Leon and Richard Gere in Internal Affairs.
“A lot of the rogue cop movies that have men at the centre seem to be more focused on the idea of appetites and excess,” argues Kusama. “Whereas I think this story is more internal – and more demanding because of it.” With Erin enduring a guilt-laden relationship with an out-of-control teenage daughter, there is little wonder she’s in so much pain. “She is actually starving herself – of affection, of the good things in life – because she doesn’t feel she deserves them,” adds Hay.
The writer remembers a phrase that he and Manfredi pinned up on the corkboard in their office: ‘She suffers because she is a moral person.’ “She is a person who is very flawed but she does have a moral centre,” he explains. “She’s extremely compromised and is extremely wrong and has lost her way, but if she wasn’t moral, she wouldn’t be suffering.” Or as Kidman told one interviewer: “This film is about regret and shame… but it’s also about salvation.”
When the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this year, Kidman’s startling antihero saw her immediately installed as a Best Actress contender in this coming awards season. Of course, Oscar loves a glamorous actress playing down her looks – think Charlize Theron’s ‘make-down’ in Monster or Kidman’s own Academy-winning turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. But Destroyer is no reverse-vanity project.
Surprisingly, Kidman’s time in the make-up chair took just 40 minutes a day, estimates Kusama. The bigger part of the transformation came with her posture. “I kept talking to her about collapsing around your heart and almost looking like you’re hurt all the time. She had this limping, loping walk [in the film].” She also dropped down the register of her voice. “That required a little more concentration for her.”
Ironically, unlike her character, time has been kind to Kidman. As Kusama puts it, the Australian actress has embraced the power and wisdom that comes with age. “She can say, ‘I’m 51 and I do what I want to do now.’ She’s in the best creative zone as an artist that I think she’s ever had.” The director also calls her “one of the least strategic actors” she’s ever met. “She doesn’t think about one move in relation to the next,” she explains. “She just asks herself: ‘Do I want to tell the story and be this character?’”
While Kidman is the main draw for Destroyer, she’s surrounded by a supporting cast of pure class:
Captain America: The Winter Soldier star Sebastian Stan plays Erin’s fellow detective, Chris; Scoot McNairy is her ex-husband Ethan, Stronger’s Tatiana Maslany is gang member Petra and Toby Kebbell is Silas, a character almost as enigmatic as Erin. “He’s a terrifying sociopath,” reveals Hay. “But ultimately, it’s not about him, it’s about her.”
Arriving at a time when gender norms are being challenged in cinema and beyond, placing a female cop at the centre of a narrative so frequently dominated by men adds to Destroyer’s unique flavour. Hay, who first worked with Kusama on another female-driven tale, Aeon Flux, notes that “the presence of a female character instantly makes it more complicated… it enlivens it and makes it more open to what’s happening in the world.”
While Britain has always led the way in this arena with Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in TV’s Prime Suspect, Erin Bell runs her close as one of drama’s great female cops: troubled, tormented and tough as cow-hide. “She really was on the page – and I hope on the screen – a character that you have to wrestle with and negotiate with in your mind, as you’re confronted by her,” says Kusama. “I like that there was so much mystery to her.” JM
ETA | 25 JANUARY / DESTROYER OPENS NEXT MONTH.
‘KiDman’s in thE BEst CrEativE zonE as an artist that i thinK shE’s EvEr haD’ KAryN KusAmA