Kidman goes true gritty in ‘Destroyer’
In Karyn Kusama’s “Destroyer,” Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman wears the same ravaged expression most of the time as Los Angeles police Detective Erin Bell. She looks, as many have noted, like an extra from “The Walking Dead,” ready to take a big, bloody chomp out of someone’s face. Her eyes are dead. Her messy dark hair is pasted to her head. Her skin is awful. She looks dirty. What has done this to her is her past undercover work with the department investigating bank robbers, during which she became a junkie. Currently, she’s mostly a drunk. In opening scenes, Bell arrives at the scene of a murder and knows the identity of the victim and probable killer. She also receives a $100 bill stained from a dye pack in the mail at her desk at the precinct office, something treated like an unusual event by her boss. Don’t cops get mail at their jobs? Erin believes that the bill is a sign from Silas (Brit Toby Kebbell), the ultra-violent head of the old gang in which she worked undercover with her former partner Chris (Sebastian Stan, “Captain America” films), and that the gang is once again in the game. Erin, who has a 16-year-old daughter (Jade Pettyjohn), looks up former gang members, starting with Toby (James Jordan), who is living with his mother on compassionate leave from prison and dying presumably of AIDS. In exchange for information, Toby demands a safe form of sexual gratification from Erin and Erin unhappily obliges, in only one example of how “Destroyer” and Kidman are going for it. What “it” is I am not sure — street cred, probably, or awards consideration (yes, Kidman received her 12th Golden Globe nomination for the film). Toby gives Erin the location of Arturo (Zach Villa), a former gang member who now gives legal advice to immigrants. Arturo gives Erin the name of shady lawyer DiFranco (Bradley Whitford). This leads Erin to Silas’ girlfriend Petra (Tatiana Maslany, “Orphan Black”). And so on and so forth. “Destroyer,” which features flashbacks to Erin’s sordid past, is nothing if not methodical. We all know where this is headed, sort of. The screenplay by the team of Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (“Clash of the Titans,” “Ride Along”) tries hard for authenticity, doesn’t quite get there and will end up being too clever for its own good. “Destroyer” often reminded me of William Friedkin’s much better “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985) with a young William Petersen and Willem Dafoe as a Secret Service agent and a killer counterfeiter, respectively. Kidman has gone the unglamorous route before, most notably for her Oscar winning performance in “The Hours,” in which she plays modernist English author Virginia Woolf wearing a false nose. Since her international breakout in the Phillip Noyce thriller “Dead Calm” (1989) — watch it — and her teaming with Tom Cruise in Tony Scott’s bombastic “Days of Thunder” (1990), Kidman demonstrated the range of her artistry with her Golden Globe Award-winning performance as a fictionalized version of Pamela Smart in Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For.” With follow-up work with Stanley Kubrick (“Eyes Wide Shut”), Baz Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge!”) and Alejandro Amenabar (“The Others”), Kidman has shown an uncanny ability to balance the ridiculous (“Aquaman”) and the sublime (“Big Little Lies”). “Destroyer” is somewhere in between.