Destroyer showcases Kidman’s finest hours
Destroyer (R16, 123 mins) Directed by Karyn Kusama Reviewed by
★★★★
In downtown Los Angeles, a place apparently lit by blazing sun every day, grimy sodium and flickering neon every night, one renegade LAPD detective is gathering up some epically bad work stories.
She’s arrived at a murder scene still drunk from the night before. However, it’s clear from the pain and anger in her eyes that she is still well inside that ill-defined hinterland where the night has not really ended, even though the remorseless LA sun might have been up for hours.
Nicole Kidman is Detective Erin Bell. And she has a hell of a story to tell. Over the next couple of hours, what unfurls is a classically paced fable of cops, robbers and doublecrosses with several nods to classics, from The Big Sleep to Chinatown and The Departed.
Destroyer also proudly and clearly shares a little DNA with Michael Mann’s hugely influential Heat, with at least one scene a clear homage – I think – to the 1995 film.
But Destroyer has within it another story and it is – at times – a more-nuanced and subtle story than the one the more visible onscreen action is showing us.
Destroyer is explicitly a tale of a woman functioning and fighting within the most poisonously masculine environments and situations imaginable.
Bell’s work as an undercover officer embedded within a gang of career bank robbers is as good a parable as I’ve ever seen for the life of any woman working in a maledominated industry, dissembling and then managing the egos of the men around them just to stay afloat and moving forward.
Jodie Foster worked inside a similar trope in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). What Kidman does here has echoes of Foster, but with none of Silence’s clear-cut moral framework to rest against.
Present in pretty much every frame of the film, Kidman is extraordinary. The greatest mystery of the Best Actress award at this year’s Oscars isn’t how did Olivia Colman beat Glenn Close, but how the actual hell did Kidman as Bell not even score a nomination?
Director Karyn Kusama had her career wrecked for years by a wretched studio-edit of her project
Aeon Flux. But it’s worth noting that whenever Kusama has had control over the final cut of a film –
Girl Fight, The Invitation and now
Destroyer – the result has been an absolute triumph.
The sheer brutality of Destroyer often masks the wickedly bleak satire at play here. And the gunfights, car smashes and brawls are all impressively staged.
But, as with Heat, it is the storytelling that gives the film its indelible power and what will make it well worth coming back to in a few more years, just to appreciate the wit with which Kusama, Kidman and their team have spun their yarn.