What’s up with Nicole Kidman’s disappointing TV roles?
INKOO KANG
IF YOU want an overview of the past three decades at the movies, especially of prestige pictures and art-house cinema, you could do a lot worse than the filmography of Nicole Kidman.
Within the 2003 Oscar winner’s projects are glimpses of the trends that have shaped Hollywood’s past quarter-century: the big-budget takeover by superhero flicks (Batman Forever and Aquaman); the stop-and-start resurrection of the studio musical (Moulin Rouge!); the rise of “elevated horror” (The Others); the haphazard rebooting of any and all intellectual property (Bewitched and The Stepford Wives); the overwhelming whiteness of female-led features (The Hours and The Beguiled); even the demoralising unstoppability of Adam Sandler (Just Go With It).
As film critic Ann Hornaday noted in a 2017 appreciation, Kidman has enjoyed “one of the most fascinating careers in a business notorious for pigeon-holing its starlets early”.
While her ex-husband Tom Cruise has spent the past decade creating an aura of aloof invincibility through action movies and box-office-conquering franchise instalments, Kidman has mostly gone in the opposite direction, evincing through her film choices experimentation and unpredictability.
It was probably because of her alertness to industry currents, salient among them the migration of substantive female roles for women older than 35 from the movies to television, that brought her to HBO’S Big Little Lies (for which she won a best actress Emmy) and The Undoing, and now Nine Perfect Strangers, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, in which she plays an enigmatic wellness guru.
But it’s increasingly hard not to notice the disjunct between the productive openness that drives Kidman the film actor and the cautious awards-baiting (and diminishing returns) that define Kidman the TV star.
After the early 2000s peaks of Moulin Rouge! and The Hours, in which she incarnated, respectively, a tubercular showgirl and Virginia Woolf, the actor spent the next decade-and-a-half proving there was no such thing as a Nicole Kidman role.
Yes, she seems to have a soft spot for embodying real-life personages, no matter how little the resemblance. In addition to Woolf, Kidman has played Grace Kelly, Diane Arbus and Gretchen Carlson and will soon appear on-screen as Lucille Ball. But a scan of her filmography reveals the “actorly submission” to auteurs that Hornaday cites.
Her directors are, in fact, a “who’s who” of boldface-named film-makers: Stanley Kubrick, Nora Ephron, Anthony Minghella, Aaron Sorkin, Gus Van Sant, Lee Daniels, Jane Campion, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Werner Herzog, Park Chan-wook, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier.
It’s tempting, then, to attribute the stultifying homogeneity of Kidman’s more recent TV roles to her sudden timidity regarding her collaborators.
Creator David E Kelley’s Big Little Lies marked a turning point in Kidman’s genre-agnostic, typecast-resistant trajectory. As Celeste, the patrician wife of a charming but violent husband (played by Alexander Skarsgard) and mother to two small boys, Kidman revealed layer after layer of fragility, terror and repression, as her character came to terms with the physical abuse she’d tried for years to excuse and the grim possibility of her sons learning to normalise their father’s roughness with their mother. It was a show-stopping performance, especially in Kidman’s therapy scenes with Robin Weigert, as well as an Emmy-deserving turn.
Disappointingly, Kidman followed up with another Kelley series, The Undoing, in which she hardly stretched as the patrician wife of a charming but violent husband (this time played by Hugh Grant) and mother to a young son. Though The Undoing was a ratings hit, its creative failures are reflected in the lack of Emmy nominations for Kidman and the miniseries itself, though Grant did receive a nod for his role as a slippery megalomaniac.
While the true nature of Kidman’s spiritual teacher, Masha, on Kelley and John Henry Butterworth’s Nine Perfect Strangers is initially withheld, the more details we learn about her, the less she appears the exotic rare bird that’s initially suggested and more the familiar blend of affluence, violence, self-suppression and threatened motherhood.
Kidman may well love collaborating with Kelley, and these recurring themes and milieus just might be the ones that speak most to her. But her doldrums do feel like a waste of her chameleonic talents, as well as of her star power to get approved under-theradar projects that don’t already have a TV legend’s name attached. And if she regrets the decline in reputation that her all-over-the-place approach got her, she has nine films with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 30% or less – the prudence doesn’t seem to be doing her any favours, either.
But it also feels uncharitable to solely blame Kidman and Kelley when misfires like The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers reflect not just individual artists’ choices, but the calcifying tropes of “prestige TV”. Given the hundreds of scripted series that are made every year, there should be room for more dramas about complicated marriages and the epidemic of violence against women – and certainly outside the confines of whiteness and wealth.
Until then, you can see Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers, which seems destined to become best-known not for its lead performances, but for its resemblance – and inferiority – to The White Lotus, another show much like it. | The Washington Post