The case for Kidman
The star belongs in the pantheon of great actresses, according to Ann Hornaday.
Nicole Kidman. The name conjures many associations: the tumble of red curls and blueeyed face of the star as a newcomer to the screen; the marriage to Tom Cruise and ensuing escape from Scientology; the lithe physique and dewy features she wears to this day. But one phrase we often forget to attach to her: great actress.
Perhaps because of her self-effacing modesty, it’s been easy to underestimate Kidman over her career that now spans three decades. But this week has offered a reminder of why we should prize an actress who has fashioned one of the most fascinating careers in a business notorious for pigeonholing its starlets early, keeping them boxed in and discarding them when their physical attributes show signs of aging.
Kidman has largely escaped that trap, as anyone who watched the recent HBO series Big Little Lies can attest. The stylish thriller-slash-domestic-melodrama turned out to be a sleeper hit largely on the strength of its ensemble cast, which included Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, Shailene Woodley and Kidman, who played the abused wife of a prosperous executive.
Kidman, who co-produced with Witherspoon, was a standout in the series, her portrayal of a woman fighting for her physical and psychic survival radiating shame, confusion, determination and barely perceptible ripples of latent power.
Kidman had previously whipsawed her audience into another direction entirely: In Queen of the Desert, a 2015 film re-released Friday in the U.S., she portrays photographer Gertrude Bell, a contemporary of T.E. Lawrence who travelled the Arabian Peninsula in the early 20th century and helped redraw the region’s boundaries after the First World War.
Written and directed by Werner Herzog with an uncharacteristically stodgily sentimental hand, Queen of the Desert isn’t a great film. But none of its faults lie with Kidman, who dominates the screen in nearly every shot with regal composure and restraint.
This is a familiar dynamic in Kidman’s filmography: She’s made some famous duds, including the historical pseudo-epic Australia, the campy The Paperboy and the ill-advised Grace Kelly biopic Grace of Monaco. But even in her worst movies, Kidman is never the problem. Her performances rise above whatever dreck they’re in.
But the bad movies are few compared to the triumphs: She won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, a full seven years after her astonishing portrayal of a fame-hungry TV journalist in To Die For, in which she silenced the doubters with a triumphant satirical performance.
One need only consider Kidman’s vanity-free supporting appearance in last year’s Lion, alight quickly on Moulin Rouge! and The Others and go back to her breakout roles in Dead Calm and Days of Thunder to appreciate the rigour and range of an actress who holds her own with Meryl Streep, Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett but is rarely mentioned in their company.
Rigour, range and — most crucially — curiosity: Just as admirable as her performances have been Kidman’s film choices and the filmmakers she wants to work with. Even after becoming a star, she’s made small, artistically risky films that may not have had an upside where finances or fame were concerned but pushed the medium in exhilarating and sometimes strange, even alienating ways. For every conventional Hollywood production such as Cold Mountain or The Interpreter, she’s made a chilly, Brechtian experiment in actorly submission, such as Lars von Trier’s Dogville, or supported a still-emerging filmmaker, as in Jonathan Glazer’s superb spiritual thriller Birth.
Not many people saw Kidman’s mesmerizing portrayal of photographer Diane Arbus in the boundary-breaking film Fur, or her turn as a grieving mother in Rabbit Hole, or as the traumatized grown-up daughter of selfinvolved artists in The Family Fang. But she has become one of the industry’s most adventurous side players, a headliner who leverages her gifts and box-office pull in service to pushing the art form forward. It should surprise no one that her upcoming projects include the edgy, feminist TV mystery series Top of the Lake and films with Sofia Coppola and the Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster).
In an industry dedicated to escapism, shallow reassurance and dumbing down, Kidman has pursued thoughtfulness, intelligence and risk. It’s nothing new for actresses to search out envelopes to push in the name of publicity, “stretching” or simply staying relevant. In Kidman’s case, her finest performance may be a cumulative one, far outstripping the workaday job of taking a character from the page to the stage. Her genius is as strategic as it is technical, in how she’s leveraged stardom on behalf of growth, taste and sophistication. With her technical and physical gifts, she could have been sleepwalking through the past 30 years. Instead, she’s chosen to keep her eyes wide open.