Hear Me Out: ‘To Die For’ is the greatest performance of Nicole Kidman’s career
Mention Nicole Kidman to a group of people, and they will each probably think of a different film. Throughout her multi-decade career, the Australian actor has gone out of her way to be unpredictable. From Baz Luhrmann’s lavish musical romance Moulin Rouge to the radically spare Lars von Trier drama Dogville, Kidman has proven time and again that she can dazzle in a production of any size with a script of any genre.
Curiously, however, Kidman is often left out of lists of the best female actors. Where the likes of Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Bette Davis are bound to appear, Kidman’s inclusion is hit or miss. In some ways, she may be the victim of her own success. More than almost any other actor of her stature, she has shown an enduring commitment to professional risk-taking. It’s hard to imagine Meryl Streep peeing on Zac Efron for a movie (though there’s always hope). Not just any actor could sympathetically portray a widow who believes her husband has been reincarnated into a ten-year-old boy.
Whether she’s playing a grieving parent, a chilly housewife, or a witch, Kidman imbues her characters with utter authenticity. She’s been nominated for five Oscars and won for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in 2003’s The Hours, but it was her pairing with an equally eclectically-minded director that produced the greatest performance of her career.
Gus Van Sant’s black comedy To Die For is just as difficult to categorise as Nicole Kidman is an actor. Released in 1995, it follows Suzanne Stone, a young woman from a small town in New Hampshire who is determined to become a nationally recognised television newscaster. When her husband casts doubt on her ambitions, she turns her charms on an impressionable high school student, played by Joaquin Phoenix, to help her resolve the problem.
Like Kidman, Van Sant has made a career out of bold, unpredictable choices. From blockbuster tearjerkers like Good Will Hunting and Milk to subversive indies like My Own Private Idaho and the Columbine massacre-inspired Elephant, he has shown a range that few other directors dare to achieve. He even made a near shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho starring, of all people, Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates.
Not surprisingly, Van Sant and Kidman turned out to be a professional match made in heaven. As Suzanne, Kidman is given a role of rare complexity. Her character doesn’t have an arc so much as a plethora of competing emotions, motives, and personalities from start to finish. The film is part mockumentary, in which Suzanne appears in closeup, telling her own story as she sees it. Emotions flit across her face like shadows. At times, she is playing an ingenue somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Meg Ryan. She is coy, doe-eyed, and naive. At other times, she is steely and cold, with flashes of rage that seem to breach the surface without warning.
And then there is her smile. Throughout the film, Kidman can turn the brooding, calculating glower of a femme fatale into a brilliant, gleaming smile with the deflective power of a force field within a split second. Sometimes, such as when she sucks on a straw seductively while tearing the toothpick umbrella out of her drink in one fierce motion, she can play both stereotypes simultaneously.
The role of Suzanne allows Kidman to be multiple characters at once. By giving her extended monologues in close-up, Van Sant shows just how much he trusts her to do all the storytelling with her face and the deft inflections of her voice. It’s a masterclass in acting, and although it appeared early in her career, it hints at the roles she would inhabit in years to come. The obvious parallels are her turns in the 2004 drama The Stepford Wives, in which plays a woman trapped in a parallel universe of cyborg housewives, and Bombshell, the 2019 drama based on the sexual harassment scandals at Fox News and the female news anchors, including Kidman’s character, who spoke up.
Beyond these clear thematic comparisons, however, Kidman’s performance in To Die For finds an illusive balance between villain, victim, and shamelessly charismatic antihero. She’s played many complex characters before and since, but none have quite captured the scope of Suzanne Stone.
