Eric here, with a brief plea for Oscar consideration for a dark horse candidate for Best Actress: Nicole Kidman for Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer. For harmony in numbers, here’s five reasons why Nicole should be one of our final five when nominations are announced next Tuesday...
Reason 1: You really never have seen her like this. Commercials and trailers for the film have all selected quotes from reviews along the lines of how Destroyer is nothing like Nicole has done. And it’s true. This goes beyond the makeup and the physical transformation we see for her character, police officer Erin Bell. Nicole drops her voice down a few octaves, pitching her lines in a pre-death rattle that makes you lean in to her every moment. She’s quite scary here… while Nicole has that special gift for often making you worry about her and the character she’s playing, here you’re worried what she might do to others. Nicole carries and brandishes a gun with a surprising authority: you could be laughing at her slender statuesque frame during these scenes, but you decidedly do not due to Nicole altering her entire being. It’s a flip on her usual screen persona: her vibrancy has been stripped, and her face seems to get more dead as the film progresses, without losing purpose or intent as an actress. It’s a go-for-broke performance for a go-for-broke character in a go-for-broke movie.
Reason 2: She gets to play two characters, and she slays the other one too. In the film’s numerous flashbacks, we see Erin Bell in her pre-traumatic-event days. In these scenes, we get a Nicole we know and love, looking vaguely like her character in Birthday Girl (an unjustly forgotten movie that Nicole is also great in). Assigned to go undercover with some very nasty drug dealers, Flashback Erin has a hope and sweetness that eventually is lost, and Nicole makes you feel that loss. The last quarter of the film gives us Nicole’s Erin making a series of complex and quite horrifying decisions, the kind we don’t usually see our film heroines making, and this actress’ blend of fear and hope during this stretch of the film is both joy and torture to watch.
Reason 3: She gets to play a role that men usually get to play, but adds more dimensions. Destroyer could easily have been a Sidney Lumet movie in the 70s, probably with Al Pacino, or at least Roy Scheider. One of those guys would have had a teenage daughter, like Erin Bell does in this film, but they wouldn’t have had the scenes with that daughter like the ones Nicole plays to the bitter hilt here. It’s none of the usual emotional tenor between mothers and daughters that we usually see. Nicole never goes mushy in these scenes; she knows the relationship is lost, and she’s simply trying to save something for her daughter, with no heroism in mind. It’s sharp-edged and uncompromising acting that’s purely committed to the script and the larger themes.
Reason 4: She’s Nicole Kidman, giving a performance to rank in the canon of her finest performances. Like Nathaniel, I’ve been thrilled/annoyed that in the last two years, everyone has accepted Nicole as one of our best, as if she hadn’t been all along. I personally clock her with having given us at least seven truly great pieces of acting: To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut, The Hours, Dogville, Birth, Margot at the Wedding, and Rabbit Hole. Eight if you count Big Little Lies. Several others come close to great (and I know all of you would negate some of my choices and add some of your own). But the point is that there is legendary talent happening here, and her work in Destroyer is the balls.
Reason 5: She’s giving one of the most thorough, nuanced performances of the year against this year’s competition. The amount of careful thought and minutely-calibrated detail that Nicole puts into this character is mind-boggling. She climbs huge dramatic mountains here: it’s a large-scale part where she gets to play a colossal arc, and she nails it. She gets to do far more than a few of the ladies in play, and has the incredible technique that a few of them lack.
Despite her Golden Globe nomination for this performance, it’s unlikely she will be on the final list of names for Best Actress, but here's hoping for a big warm surprise.