Nicole Kidman's career moves in cyclical repetitions, always coming back to the Australian star having to prove herself and then re-emerge with a revitalized surge of prestige and popularity. It happened back home, when Kidman found early success in popcorn cinema, leading to bigger roles that let her prove her mettle. At the end of the 1980s, she was on her way to securing the respect afforded a serious actress. But, as she traveled to Hollywood, Kidman had to start over. For a while, she was Tom Cruise's starlet girlfriend first and foremost, before a string of more challenging roles set the stage for widespread acclaim, culminating with an Oscar win. We'd see the cycle come back around after a slew of commercial and critical flops besmirched her image, making her the butt of many a plastic surgery joke. And then, there was her 2010s resurgence and the "rediscovery" of her talents in a new era of prestige TV. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Today, we arrive at that Academy Award victory, the first great peak of Kidman's Hollywood journey. It was when she donned a prosthetic nose and delivered the specter of Virginia Woolf for Stephen Daldry's adaptation of The Hours…
I knew Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf before the author herself. My first go-around with The Hours came early in the life of a budding cinephile, but it was only in adulthood that the English writer's work consumed my imagination and filled my bookshelves. Revisiting the 2002 film in who knows how long, I'm struck by how much my new relationship with Woolf and even Michael Cunningham's The Hours has transformed how I look at Kidman's creation. It's not necessarily a matter of finding the work suddenly lacking or gaining new insight into its greatness. Instead, it's more akin to gleaning depths and choices I didn't recognize in my teens.
Then again, a decade-long battle with depression and suicidal ideation may also be to blame, opening up new ways of relating to the woman on screen. Truth be told, examining these connective tissues between viewer and film can lead one down the road of solipsism. However, these seem like essential factors to mention. Especially since I'd argue the peak of Kidman's work happens early in the film, when Daldry shows us Woolf's death and has his leading lady act out the writer's actual suicide note through narration. From the determined body language to the haunting, yet lucid, weight with which she imbues every word, the actress conveys a vision of Virginia Woolf unlike anything else put to film.
She's a tragedy who repudiates that very notion, a sadness that goes beyond self-pity but is also too worn-down and exhausted to be hostile. She's sharp and direct, but the blade never seems to point out toward those who listen, or read or watch. Instead, the edge goes in, and with each syllable, one almost feels the steel caress against flesh and gristle, the point cutting beyond the physical and into the soul. Virginia Woolf drowned herself, but Nicole Kidman interprets her fate like a medical student performing an autopsy on their own body, a scalpel secure in her hand. And unlike Virginia, whose fingers often ache and cramp around the pen, her interpreter's grip is steady.
Against her co-stars' flirtations with melodrama, her director's stagey instincts and Glass' exuberant piano, Kidman is like a lemon squeeze over cream. She's the citric acid cutting through fat, a biting contrast that complicates flavors and refreshes one's palate whenever she manifests. And that's not very often, mind you. Though it might be hard to believe, Kidman has the least screen time out of the film's three leads. Indeed, hers is among the shortest turns to ever win the Best Actress Oscar. This means she has less space to sketch out her portrait while also existing as a sort of god particle. Virginia Woolf is the genesis of the Dalloway read by Julianne Moore's Laura Brown and embodied in Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughan.
But the writer also feels more isolated than even her midcentury reader, who ponders suicide during a despairing afternoon. The 1923 narrative exists in a vague untethering from the other two as if directing them through the ideas within Mrs. Dalloway – a woman's life, her entire life, in one day. Logically, Kidman's approach follows suit, exacerbating the disconnection rather than trying to bridge the gap. Moreover, she's burdened with a character who spends a good portion of her time either writing or thinking about it. The process is as uncinematic as it gets, but the performance does much to unearth some dramatic dynamism within.
It's not vitality, rather its opposite. Kidman plays Virginia's work as a taxing thing, pulling the woman into deep thought and dark looks to nowhere or an invisible somewhere. Her posture never feels comfortable, hands familiar with the action of putting pen to paper though seldom at ease in their exercise. For someone who spends most of her time dressed in garden florals, Kidman's Virginia seems half-embalmed, struggling to show signs of life through the cadaver stuffing and rigor mortis. Still, she throws herself against the cage of living death, a violent fight happening beneath her gaze in every scene.
Consider the tenderness of husband and wife, the little smiles that encourage his comfort during a period when the man lives as a livewire of constant concern. That softness between them is played like a matter of fact, a bond that extends far beyond the story's frame. But the cajoling morsel of assurance, of unpersuasive optimism, that Virginia throws at him is never effortless. Even wandering through the house as the lady of the manor, the author looks like she's playing a part in a most unconvincing manner. The kitchen begets disgust at the mess of sustenance from dead flesh, and the garden is a cemetery where one can find an uneasy peace.
Not everything works. I find that Kidman sometimes overplays Virginia's skittishness, conveying a nervous adolescence rather than the plight of someone who needs to perform normalcy since she can't come to it naturally. While the manual business of writing is conveyed with evocative strain, some of the other details can come off as affectations. The way Virginia punctuates half-whispered words with the drag of a cigarette can seem awful theatrical, for example. And fiddling with the pockets of her sack-like dress is another bit of overplayed physicality. But for every wrong gesture, a million more are pitch-perfect.
Everything to do with Miranda Richardson's Vanessa Bell – the writer's sister – is a disquieting miracle that almost slips the film into a different register altogether. With the other actress and trio of child performers that come along with her, Kidman finds a dormant monstrousness in her Virginia. It's not destructive, per se, nor threatening. However, it unnerves and teeters on the edge of grotesque, harkening to a million other interactions and a complicated personal history we aren't privy to. Just the way the two women sit on a bench is telling, and so is the terror that seems to take over Vanessa's expression whenever Virginia's odd behavior resurges.
Their farewell shows these ideas reaching a boiling point. They culminate in a kiss between the two women, prompted by the writer in an act of apparent despair. All The Hours leads have a pivotal lip lock in their story, yet they all suggest different readings. In the case of Kidman and Miranda, the former goes into it with vampiric hunger, as if Virginia were trying to suck the life out of her sister. Is she doing it out of a desire to live or to find companionship in her half-dead state? Is she angry, needing to prove she's not well after all? Is it a rebellion, an attack, a stab at survival, or the death rattle of a moribund animal? Is it just the gravitational vortex of Virginia's mental state?
Depression as a void is a concept I'm well familiar with, a nebulousness over one's mind that can turn you into a black hole for those around you - those who love you most of all. I've seldom seen it so viscerally represented in cinema than in this kiss. After such stellar work, the train confrontation between Virginia and Mr. Woolf pales in every regard, no matter that a bunch of awards organizations used it as Kidman's clip. Like Laura's drowning dream and Clarissa's witnessing of a friend's suicide, the entire thing feels like an instance where script and direction are doing too much to spell out what the actresses' have already established or have invoked.
And in any case, the quieting finish to the scene hits harder than its shouts. It's the choice of death defended with emphatic resolve and the weariness when seeing how much it hurts her husband. It's the acceptance of his kindness when Mr. Woolf puts a hand upon her back and the calm that comes over the woman's constant storm. More than many of the actress's best works, this portrait lives and dies in its base-level intensity, offering few opportunities to deviate from it without betraying Daldry and Cunningham's approach, or perchance Virginia's integrity as a character. But within those limitations, our beloved thespian still delivers a remarkable achievement, as she so often does.
Does Nicole Kidman get my vote in that 2002 Best Actress lineup? No, but you'll never find me complaining that she won. This star deserves an Oscar, and her Virginia Woolf deserves applause.
Previously in the Nicole Kidman TFE Tribute:
- Introductiom (1983-1989) - Early Australian films
- Billy Bathgate (1991) – her first Golden Globe nomination!
- Malice (1993) - when Kidman met Sorkin
- To Die For (1995) - her first Golden Globe win!
- The Portrait of a Lady (1996) - a Campion experiment
- Practical Magic (1998) - comfort food cinema
- Eyes Wide Shut (1999)- Kubrick. Cruise. Kidman.
- Moulin Rouge! (2001) - her first Oscar nomination!
- The Others (2001) - a foray into horror
Next, the Nicole Kidman tribute moves from over-literate despair to Brechtian suffering. It's time to pack our bags and catch a ride to Lars von Trier's Dogville.