A fast confession: I’ve by no means seen the unique Stepford Wives as a result of I’m so shamefully keen on the 2004 remake, during which Nicole Kidman performs each a ferocious redheaded tv govt and her blissed-out, high-femme, blond doppelgänger. At first, the beats of the story are the identical: After a office meltdown, Joanna (Kidman) and her husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick), search refuge in a pastel-colored Connecticut city the place—spoiler—the whiny, emasculated males have roboticized their careerist wives, whom they function with distant controls that appear to be shiny gold vibrators. Quickly sufficient, they recruit Walter to affix them, and he agrees to microchip his personal. The twist within the remake is that he can’t undergo with it. Joanna, it seems, is a shrewd tactician within the uncanny, lights-out physique of a bombshell, hiding in plain sight.
Possibly you may see the place I’m going with this. For the previous decade or so, since her Emmy-winning flip in HBO’s Massive Little Lies, Kidman has careened dizzyingly between artist and star. Final week, proper as she received the Volpi Cup for Finest Actress on the Venice Movie Pageant, for her audacious efficiency within the erotic thriller Babygirl, she headlined Netflix’s new collection The Excellent Couple, providing a efficiency so stilted and stylized for the primary 5 episodes, it felt a bit of like robotic Nicole was again. Throughout the realm of movie, Kidman seeks out auteurs to work with: Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Lars von Trier, Yorgos Lanthimos. On tv, usually in reveals that she herself produces, she presides over what the author David Mack final week named Nicole Kidman’s Seashore-Reads Cinematic Universe: shiny, opulent collection about inscrutable, secret-keeping white girls that skirt the road between status and pap. (The opening credit to The Excellent Couple characteristic all the forged dancing a choreographed sequence on the seashore to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals.”)
In her latest TV function, Kidman performs Greer Garrison Winbury, a well-liked novelist of homicide mysteries and the absurdly mannered matriarch of a privileged Nantucket household. The present is tailored from the novel of the identical identify by Elin Hilderbrand, which describes Greer at one level as conveying “class, class, regality even.” In character, Kidman certainly seems like a constructed imaginative and prescient of femininity: teased yellow hair, a rigidly slender body, a managed voice, a gaze that’s equivocal and indifferent. She’s greater than a bit of alien, unnaturally poised and unreachable. Susanne Bier, the Danish filmmaker who directed The Excellent Couple, is thought for her tight close-ups, and with some forged members, she zooms all the way in which in to indicate us the trivia of their eyebrows, their nostril, their pores. However with Kidman, she usually movies the actor behind glass, as if to respect her distance—her unwillingness to let audiences get shut. I might sense the intention behind it, however that didn’t imply it labored; there are moments when Greer jogged my memory of, say, Kristen Wiig doing Katharine Hepburn on Saturday Evening Stay. (“We love you,” she purrs to a videographer, about her son and his fiancée. “We LOVE you.”)
Within the closing episode, although, Kidman pulls off certainly one of her signature flips, revealing a few of what she’s been enjoying in any respect alongside. The episode made me ponder whether I’d been doing her an injustice by presuming that she conceives of her roles as binary: the “severe” jobs with visionary administrators versus the women-oriented airport-novel variations. There’s a unifying thread throughout her work that presumably deserves extra consideration. Kidman has portrayed, throughout a number of a long time of working in Hollywood, practically each sticky trope within the business’s playbook. She’s been the damsel in misery (Lifeless Calm, Far and Away), the femme fatale (Moulin Rouge, The Human Stain), the unknowable ingenue (Birthday Lady, Dogville), the witch (Sensible Magic, Bewitched). In each the current Netflix film A Household Affair—a bewildering romance with Zac Efron—and within the upcoming Babygirl, she performs an older girl drawn right into a sexual relationship with a youthful man. In most of those roles, she leans into cliché solely to invert it. Her performances parse what visible storytelling insinuates about girls, permitting her to embody a selected type of artifice earlier than smashing it up in entrance of our eyes.
Discover this Kidman bait and swap as soon as, the truth is, and also you’ll begin seeing it in every single place. It helps that, as an actor, she withholds greater than she reveals, favoring shards of perception over full reflection. In 1993’s Malice, a wily neo-noir, Kidman performs Tracy, a demure newlywed and preschool trainer who’s affected by a diabolical physician (Alec Baldwin)—till we study that Tracy is far more implicated in occasions than she seems. The film works solely as a result of Kidman can play in such completely different registers: the muted, wide-eyed bride and her thrilling, histrionic different. Again and again, her performances assert that we do not know what her characters—and, by proxy, the actor herself—are able to. Nadia, the Russian mail-order bride of Jez Butterworth’s 2001 movie Birthday Lady, bounces unnervingly amongst a number of guises: seducer, charlatan, love curiosity.
What do Nicole Kidman’s girls need? Greater than they’re getting. Within the second half of the ’90s, Kidman accomplished a run of chaotically disparate roles that have been nonetheless outlined by an identical state of intense craving. In Gus Van Sant’s darkish 1995 satire, To Die For, she performed a wannabe TV-news reporter whose ambition prickled like popping sweet below the pores and skin. In Jane Campion’s 1996 The Portrait of a Girl, she was Isabel Archer, Henry James’s decided naïf who’s conned by scheming dilettantes. Three years later, she starred reverse her then-spouse, Tom Cruise, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Broad Shut, enjoying a married girl whose confessions of erotic goals about different males torment her husband. The performances have been all wildly completely different, however every character embodied the identical acute frustration at being boxed in by the expectations of others. This was an period in Hollywood, because the movie critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2003, during which actresses have been anticipated to be sweethearts, adept at exhibiting “a sure type of heat, without delay sexual and sympathetic.” However heat has by no means been Kidman’s pure mode. She fascinates, however she doesn’t ingratiate.
In The Excellent Couple, because the mom of a son who’s getting married to a girl Greer sees as an intruder, she’s as chilled and taut as a corpse, gliding from room to room in impartial silks and infrequently exuding flashes of actual menace. Everybody else on the present is cheerfully hamming it up—Dakota Fanning harnessing elite ranges of (spoiled) brat as one other daughter-in-law, Eve Hewson modeling perplexed everywoman accessibility because the bride—and amid the liveliness, Kidman’s efficiency feels markedly misplaced. Greer works at a frenzied clip, churning out new books every year to assist fund her sybaritic household’s way of life. In return, at household occasions, she enforces the deranged protocol of a minor British royal. (“Amelia, didn’t I provide you with a household gown to put on?” she calls for of the bride-to-be; later, watching Amelia nibble at a croissant, she murmurs, “Wedding ceremony costume be damned, huh.”) Fixing an unblinking, barely bulging gaze on anybody who crosses her, Greer is high-diva loftiness. However Kidman doesn’t appear to be having enjoyable with the function a lot as she’s looking for its darkish middle. She is, you may inform, taking all of this fairly severely.
Possibly that’s as a result of Greer’s roiling ennui is of a chunk with so lots of Kidman’s more moderen roles—disconsolate, wounded girls dealing with a world that writes them off, uncharitably, as depressed wine mothers. Kidman has made the artwork of enjoying nebulously anguished girls her personal, even earlier than 2017’s HBO collection Massive Little Lies, during which her character, Celeste, regularly begins to face the thought that her sexually thrilling marriage may also be abusive. The actor has lengthy been drawn, hauntingly, to characters who’ve misplaced youngsters, from Lifeless Calm to 2010’s Rabbit Gap (her first credit score as a producer along with her firm, Blossom Movies) to Lulu Wang’s current Amazon collection Expats. She incessantly tackles, and subverts, the function of the mom. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2017 horror movie, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, she performs a girl who argues at one level that her personal life is price greater than that of her youngsters. In 2022’s The Northman, enjoying Queen Gudrún, she manifests an eerie, monstrous sexual authority to—in one more fiendish plot twist—ensnare her personal son.
The house the place intercourse and energy intersect is a minefield for ladies performers, and it’s floor that Kidman has lengthy claimed as her terrain. It doesn’t appear coincidental that Babygirl comes precisely 1 / 4 century after Eyes Broad Shut, or that Kidman continues to current herself as a sexual determine in her late 50s. For the primary a long time of her profession, passive sexuality was generally anticipated from feminine stars—the discount you made once you wished high billing. Quite than settle for these phrases, Kidman wielded her sexuality as a weapon. In 1998, whereas she was one-half of the business’s strongest couple and nonetheless negotiating her standing in Hollywood exterior of it, she starred in a West Finish manufacturing of David Hare’s The Blue Room, enjoying 5 separate roles in a efficiency that one critic described as “pure theatrical Viagra.” In 2001’s Moulin Rouge, successfully her divorce film, her courtesan, Satine, was sexual dynamite in whalebone and feathers. Kidman is aware of what visible storytelling desires from girls, however will provide it solely as a part of her distinct agenda.
Being a intercourse image, as an actor, is a entice, and it’s one which Kidman has at all times managed to evade. Maybe for this reason a present like The Excellent Couple, which she produced, doesn’t appear so distant from the extra prestigious work on her résumé in any case. Greer—heightened, hyper-composed, groomed virtually to dying—is the unnatural extension of how girls are supposed to seem in public. The plain contrivance is the purpose. When, within the closing episode, Kidman whips away the window dressing to reveal who she actually is, Greer turns into a part of a murderers’ row of the actor’s girls: sudden, discomfiting characters who demand to be seen, don’t care what we consider them, and can by no means compromise.
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