Nicole Kidman Tribute: Chanel N°5: The Film (2004)

by Cláudio Alves

If someone asked me to come up with the definitive image of Nicole Kidman, I'm not sure I'd gravitate toward her work in movies or TV, nor even her red-carpet appearances. Instead, my mind would instinctually drift to that shot of industrial-grade glamour that once played at every primetime ad break. It's a Moulin Rouge! reunion and, in its way, a miniature remake with a contemporary twist. It's fashion distilled into a dream, a bespoke Lagerfeld-designed wardrobe, and a fragrance we can only imagine through the screen. It's Old Hollywood resurrected for 180 seconds of hyper-artifice and soft-focus glow, so beautiful it makes your heartache. It's Chanel N°5: The Film, of course…

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Nicole Kidman Tribute: Birth (2004)

by Cláudio Alves

After her Oscar win for The Hours, Nicole Kidman's career went through some interesting somersaults. 2003 saw her bow the avant-garde cruelty of Dogville at Cannes, while Hollywood bore witness to two prestige projects whose success is debatable. The Human Stain is one of those classic "This Had Oscar Buzz" case studies, while Cold Mountain is most interesting for how it didn't secure a Best Actress nomination despite AMPAS' affection. Then came 2004, when von Trier's Brechtian film finally reached the States, and Kidman faced critical lashings as a response to her risk-taking. If not for Dogville, then for a derided broad comedy we'll discuss later in the series. And, of course, for today's subject – Birth.

Jonathan Glazer's sophomore feature was a resounding bomb with audiences and critics back in 2004, and only the Golden Globes seemed willing to recognize the genius in Nicole Kidman's work. Twenty years later, its reputation has changed…

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Nicole Kidman Tribute: Dogville (2003)

by Eric Blume

If you’ve never seen Dogville, Lars von Trier’s 2003 masterpiece(?) that gives our Nicole three full hours’ worth of very tricky acting, watch it.  Or at least, try to watch it.  You may find it absolutely insufferable, and turn it off even before Nicole appears, twelve minutes in.  This is the definition of a movie not meant for everyone, and perhaps even a movie for almost nobody except a small sliver of people.  But I suppose am one of those people for whom the film was made, and I think it’s fantastic.  And it’s one of my all-time favorite performances by one of cinema’s greatest actresses...

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Nicole Kidman Tribute: The Hours (2002)

by Cláudio Alves

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…

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Nicole Kidman Tribute: The Others (2001)

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Jersey, the Channel Islands
1945

A screaming, terrified-looking Grace Stewart, played by an eerily put-together Nicole Kidman, awakens from a frightful dream (?) in the opening scene of Alejandro Amenábar’s wonderfully gothic 2001 thriller. Introduced in the vein of a spooky European fairy tale, The Others begins bracingly and basically doesn’t quit for all of its perfectly crafted 100 or so minutes. It’s a ghost story with ghostly storytelling beats from a pre-9/11 world of filmmaking. Released in the halcyon days of late summer 2001, The Others arrived with a pretty sterling production-distribution team at its back, despite its relatively slim ($17 million) budget: [Tom] Cruise-[Paula] Wagner Productions, Dimension Films and Studio Canal distributors. Having already announced—and by then finalized—a bombshell divorce from Cruise, Kidman appeared to have quite a bit of her own star power riding on the Cruise-produced film. Fortunately for her, The Others turned out to be an unqualified success…

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