The marketing for Karyn Kusama’s sun-dried Californian cop thriller Destroyer has leaned heavily on the supposedly drastic change of pace – and face – it represents for its very famous leading lady. “Nothing Nicole Kidman has done in her career can prepare you for Destroyer,” blares the leading pull-quote on the film’s posters, while variations of “transformative” appear below, over a straight-on image of Kidman’s admittedly dramatically altered visage: all hellishly mottled, perma-dirtied skin and ravine-deep eyebags, under a mangy, unconditioned bison pelt of a wig. It looks just enough like Kidman’s own to draw in the devoted, but removed from the poster, anyone else might take for a particularly egregious DUI mugshot.
“See [X actor] as you’ve never seen them before” is, of course, a time-honoured promotional strategy, particularly when it comes to campaigning for acting awards, where elaborate makeup work or severe weight changes will never count against you. Kidman has been down this road before, to Oscar-winning effect. In 2002, the media attention on her dowdy deglam job as Virginia Woolf in The Hours rather overwhelmed the discussion of her finely wrought, emotionally piercing performance – jokes about her prosthetic hooter extended all the way to the Oscar presentation itself, as Denzel Washington opened the envelope and rather snidely announced her victory “by a nose”.
That was in the flush of Kidman’s post-divorce career rejuvenation: freed from the demeaning celebrity status of being Mrs Tom Cruise, she took a varied, adventurous jumble range of projects to fully spotlight the serious solo acting intent that To Die For, Portrait of a Lady and Eyes Wide Shut had already promised. The Hours wasn’t even the best of them, but it was the one that announced that plan most literally, with literary biopic cred, uglifying makeup and all. She was never going to win an Oscar for truly on-the-edge work like Birth or Dogville – with characters whose interiority was more unnerving than their appearance – but Woolfing it up proved the point on Academy-friendly terms.
Sixteen years on, the point no longer needs to be proved. We have since seen Kidman excelling in every register from brittle acid comedy (Margot at the Wedding) to sexed-up southern gothic derangement (The Paperboy) to quiet-storm trauma release (her astonishing, Emmy-winning turn on TV’s Big Little Lies), with enough bizarre missteps and undeserved misfires in between to give her career a jaggedly complicated arc. All of which is to say that pretty much everything Kidman has done in her career has prepared us – and more importantly, her – for the role of raggedly bent Los Angeles cop Erin Bell in Kusama’s film, if only because it’s hard these days to think of what a typical Kidman role might be.
On the outside, at least. For it’s what emerges from beneath that disorientingly scorched, ruined exterior that feels more familiar to Kidman, as Bell proves another expert study in her gallery of smart women who lie to themselves — the film’s niftily two-pronged narrative finds her chasing a fortune in the past, leading to a curdled blend of redemption and revenge in the present, kidding herself all the way about how easy or successful the pursuit might be. And she suffers for it, perhaps more physically and viscerally than in any Kidman vehicle since Lars von Trier put her through the wringer in Dogville. The beatings she takes here, filmed by Kusama with the kind of blunt, unfetishised frankness that male action directors rarely direct at female protagonists, are entirely startling.
Genre films like Destroyer are rarely framed around female characters; when they are, the heroine tends to be portrayed as dully indestructible, her feminine attributes either pushed aside in favour of “one of the boys” toughness or flattened into a one-dimensional form of girl power. In this regard, Destroyer makes an interesting companion piece to Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s sharp, angry update of Lynda La Plante’s Widows – another bleak, hard-boiled genre piece to unusually place a fiftysomething woman at the active centre of its copious action. Erin Bell and Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings certainly share enough flawed, disappointment-fuelled determination to power a fiercely driven underworld mission; squint a little, and it’s not too hard to imagine how their narratives might intersect. Both films make the case for women who have been around the block a little as persuasive action heroes.
Kidman’s Bell is resilient, certainly, but her damage is foregrounded to prove it, in her scarred, choked voice (deftly lowered from the flashbacks) and her jarring makeover: that face isn’t a mere attention-grabbing stunt, but the required external manifestation of all the repeated effort and failure she’s expended and endured as a cop, as a lover and, we come to learn, as a mother too. The overriding spirit of Kidman’s performance is one of a distinctly feminine exhaustion, the impact of having to work harder than the dismissive men surrounding her just to keep her head above water – and not always excelling in the process. However might a 51-year-old woman with three decades’ experience of working in pre-#TimesUp Hollywood channel such feeling? Perhaps Destroyer isn’t such a leap for the star after all.
