Tim here. The career and talents of Nicole Kidman have been well-examined at the Film Experience through the years, but never by me. So I hope you’ll forgive the indulgence if I take advantage of her birthday to launch into a little celebration of my favorite working actress, one of the only people in the world with a legitimate claim to being both movie star and serious artist. For every big bit of Hollywood nonsense she deepens and improves with her steady presence, there’s an adventurous, even dangerous film that she makes with some of the most interesting directors out there, and she’s equally great in both modes, the odd Stepford Wives remake notwithstanding.
To celebrate, I'd like to share my 5 favorite Kidman performances, in chronological order:
Grace Stewart, The Others (2001)
I yield to no one in my love of Moulin Rouge! and Kidman’s performance therein, but this has always been my pick for her best performance of 2001, and not least because Alejandro Amenábar is less interested in ceding huge chunks of the film’s landscape to her than Baz Luhrmann. Providing the human core to an abnormally handsome, ultimately generic haunted house movie couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a rewarding assignment, but Kidman dives with intelligence and restraint into the role of a stern matriarch, terrified by the empty old house she lives in. She turns out a leading performance that is deeply sensitive and wounding (that meeting with her husband!) while also paying scrupulous attention to the mechanical needs of the horror script. She’s especially good at converting the twist ending from something ludicrous into a genuinely moving moment.
Grace Mulligan, Dogville (2003)
I’m a naughty cinephile, having never much cared for Lars von Trier’s films generally, least of all this profoundly (if not, indeed, pointlessly) austere evisceration of small-town hypocrisy. Just about the only thing about it that works at all for me is Kidman’s portrayal of the main character; but what a portrayal! Self-resolve mixes with the desire to fit in, and both are etched into sharp relief by her complex and wholly unexpected responses to being humiliated by the local townsfolk; in a laboratory of human behavior, it’s Kidman’s remarkable cross-breeding of strength and impotence that emerges the clearest and keeps the film focused. And just like The Others, the climax works almost entirely because Kidman forces it to by strength of her cast-iron will. (By the way, who else never noticed how many characters she’s played named “Grace”?)
Anna, Birth (2004)
I ranked these chronologically so as to avoid committing myself to any absolutes; but if I did want to pick Kidman’s single best performance, it wouldn’t take more than a moment of deliberation to arrive at her gorgeously cryptic anchor for Jonathan Glazer’s second feature. For one thing, there’s no clearer example of Kidman’s artistic bravery than this unnerving depiction of romantic longing between an adult woman and the pre-adolescent boy claiming to be her reincarnated husband. For another, this purposefully opaque film relies extensively, even exclusively on the tiniest details of Kidman’s performance, relying on all things she’s not saying, and the physical precision of how she’s not saying them to flesh out the film’s psychological space. Her marathon-length close-up at an opera, fluctuating between countless emotions, is one of the pinnacles of cinematic acting in the 21st Century.
Margot, Margot at the Wedding (2007)
There are few female stars of Kidman’s profile who’d role the dice on such an unlikably icy figure, particularly when that star was being so frequently labeled an ice queen herself at the time. And certainly, the fortitude with which Kidman refuses to ask us to like her is one of the reasons that I’m so taken with this brittle character.
But it’s more complex than that. Even in the hands of a never-more-acidic Noah Baumbach, it can’t all be dark and mean-spirited, and into this awful mother and worse sister, the actress weaves a thread of tragic humanity, the awareness that Margot is not cruel because she likes it, but because she doesn’t know how to be loving and kind. She brings a measure of weary humanism to a thoroughly misanthropic movie, significantly enriching it and making more endurable.
Becca Corbett, Rabbit Hole (2010)
Finally, if briefly, returning her into the welcoming arms of mainstream cinema, in the form of a long-deferred third Oscar nomination, Kidman’s collaboration with John Cameron Mitchell might seem, on the face of it, to be a break with her longstanding “interesting auteur vehicles” habit. From a directorial standpoint, Rabbit Hole is mostly notable for being far more sedate and straight than Mitchell’s previous work. But however “normal” a film it might be, it showcases a depth of character creation that modern films generally shy away from, preferring simple emotional journeys to the all-encompassing pit of despair that Kidman digs for her grieving parent of a dead 4-year-old. Her self-laceration, venomous anger at anyone and everyone around her, and a frustrated, inarticulate lack of ability to express herself are as brilliant to behold onscreen as they are punishing.
And now, I turn it to you, dear readers. What are your five favorite Nicole Kidman performances?