Had I known beforehand that Karyn Kusama was the director of “The Invitation,” (a highly overrated horror movie I barely remember turning on one night when I was in Ireland several years ago and pretty quickly turned off), I would surely have had reservations about “Destroyer” starring Nicole Kidman, notwithstanding that I absolutely love Nicole Kidman. I would see anything with her in it.
I have been meaning to see “Destroyer” for a long time. With my favorite actress playing the lead in one of my favorite genres—the damaged cop whose personal life is falling apart with an unsettled score, who requires to bend the rules of conventional morality to deliver justice—I have been anticipating keenly off and on, the unavoidable night I would watch “Destroyer.”
However, as with the prospect of a lot of things that get me excited, it has made me strangely patient. Since the movie came out in 2018, and since whenever I heard about it, it has taken me years to finally see it.
I’m not sure what beneficent forces must have conspired to intervene in earthly affairs impelling me finally to rent the movie the other week. I wish there were somebody to thank, because it was well worth seeing. I watched it twice in forty-eight hours and made the most of my $3.99 Amazon purchase.
Nicole Kidman plays Erin Bell an alcoholic ex undercover cop, brutalized by life, estranged from her sixteen year old daughter who hates her, though she’s on speaking terms with her divorced husband with whom she’s intriguingly friendly. The first we see of her she wakes up in her car sitting on the side of the road, hungover. She slouches towards the scene of a homicide, the nature of which is a harbinger of her past traumas. I suppose I should mention what Nicole Kidman looks like in this movie. She looks not how we’re used to, blonde, radiant, serene, if not magnetically distant—but the polar opposite.
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Sabrina Lantos AP
She looks horrific. And her performance as Detective Bell is intense, gritty, raw and bracingly physical. One other thing I should mention. If some things are hard to watch, I would say “Destroyer” is painful to watch, on visceral and emotional levels. Having seen it twice, I feel more hurt by it the second time.
Throughout we watch her get kicked repeatedly in the ribs and beat up after she was already down, causing her once to vomit. A sleazy bank robber on his deathbed makes her give him a handjob for information. And her 16 year old daughter Shelby who despises her, taunts her by frequenting nightclubs with her 25 year old boyfriend.
There is a lot of hurt and people hurting in this movie. There is heartbreak. There is death, and there is loss. And there is tragedy on several levels. It is a despairing movie. It is also a movie about despair.
The root of the story I suppose from which this whole web of woe centrifugally spins out its yarn is: Erin and her undercover partner, Chris, fell in love in the middle of their case. When the gang they had infiltrated decided to rob a bank, Erin proposed to Chris that since the heist involved so much money, and since the two of them had grown up poor, and they were in love, they take and keep their shares of the money at the end of the robbery. After hesitating Chris agreed to the idea. Chris was later killed in the robbery, and Erin blames herself for the circumstances surrounding his death. Chris is also the father of Erin’s daughter, as it turns out.
Since Chris died and Erin feels responsible, the trauma seems to have made her unable to cope with the rest of her life. Rather than see her daughter as the last piece of her lover whom she should be grateful to have, raise and love, Shelby is more like Chris’s tombstone, a lingering testament to her own failure to prevent his death. And because she failed in that aspect, it has made her feel unworthy of Shelby, as she already feels unworthy of her own life. Fitting Freud’s description of melancholia, Erin is the model of clinical depression: a grieving person who’s incapable of mourning.
Pretty early on we learn her daughter chose to live with her husband rather than with her, which we’re led to infer was the consequence of her baggage. In the beginning, we watch her sitting at a bar pondering the new homicide case and drop a glass of beer in her stupor, before leaving to rescue her underage daughter from another bar. Ever since the bank robbery where Chris in fact was murdered by a member of their gang, Erin has been withdrawing from existence, and choosing to drown her sorrow, pain and guilt in alcohol.
Erin’s guilt complex about Chris made it impossible to properly love and raise her daughter, which in turn made it impossible for Shelby to love Erin. Just as arguably Erin can’t love her daughter, because she hates herself too much, so Shelby can’t love Erin either, because she feels as if she weren’t good enough for her mother’s affection. There is a scene near the end where they have the most transparent communication than anywhere else in the movie, where Erin tells her it’s not her fault that Erin was absent from her life. It’s her own, it’s Erin’s—where for once in the movie her daughter doesn’t seem angry with her but only sorry on her behalf.
Here notably where Erin does the honorable thing to admit she failed as a mother, that involves by necessity taking up a new reason to feel guilty onto herself. The cost of making things right between her and her daughter, is to condemn herself as a flawed and failed human being. It’s pretty tough.
“Destroyer” is not a very cheerful movie moreover. Definitely not a “feel good” movie. You probably wouldn’t find it in the “family” category on your streaming service. Or under “comedy.”
But in its sadness, and heart-piercing despair, there is a tragic deep beauty. Indeed in a heart-rending way, not despite but as a consequence of its hideousness, the grittiness, the toughness of Erin’s life and the grotesqueness of some of the people in this movie, and the tragedy of misunderstanding and the numbing toll of the cumulative myriad indifferent blind accidents that can inexorably combine to ravage our short lives on earth that is quite palpable—it is magnificent how Nicole Kidman’s weathered face focuses and inscribes all this destitution and heartbreak.
Why I love Nicole Kidman
I love Nicole Kidman. I think a great actor or actress tends to be the same third character, that is him/herself, movie to movie. Jack Nicholson is a good example. Even though one might really transform for a role, they are true to an inner flame, and they maintain a distinct personality that adds an edge, their own distinctive brand, to whatever their role happens to be. Johnny Depp is another example. He’s a great actor, and he’s always Johnny Depp, and that’s an essential component of his greatness. Whether it’s captain Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean” or Whitey Bulger in “Black Mass.” And Nicole Kidman is no exception to this pattern elemental to dramatic greatness. As she even says in the New York Times, it’s deliberate,
“I’m trying to stay in that place of making interesting choices and staying true to my essence,”… “…When I get off that, I start flailing.”
I think a great actress pushes her creativity by seeking out novel roles in which to express herself. However, great acting has little to do with acting ostensibly, literally as acting is commonly understood, taken at face value. A great actor interprets and creates their character. She does not play a role or reflect the script. She makes up or invents a whole other identity separate from the one written for them, a distinct identity which is her own, and then the result is the unique persona she adapts on screen. This involves owning the role. Or put another way, if Nicole Kidman is great, that’s because every role she plays is an inextricable, unmistakable part of herself. Great acting then is strong self-identification.
So conversely, bad acting is poor self-identification. Take Keira Knightley for instance. She’s a horrible actress. That’s because she tries too much to reflect the role and what the audience wants or the director intends, rather than investing herself in it, making the role up or creating it, and then owning it.
Nicole Kidman therefore, with her strong self-identifications, delivers the most ingenius, indeed rare artistic gift, in way of giving us a new side of herself movie to movie to movie, which is still the same. And we enjoy seeing her variations, and we admire her component improvisational dexterity, so much—many cinephiles like me would be more than willing to see nearly anything she’s in. It’s not because she’s always different. But because she is always the same, but playing and owning a new role, and projecting the same original undeniable incomparable unequalled Nicole Kidman over and over and again and again into the realm of aesthetic appreciation.
From one of her earliest movies “To Die For,” where she plays a bombshell news reporter, murdering her husband (Matt Dillon) in cold blood as soon as he contradicts her careerism;
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to the nearly unbearably depressing “Cold Mountain” in which she plays a southern aristocrat, the love of her life (Jude Law), whom she hardly even knows, caught up in the Civil war, deserting his confederate regiment to find her
Phill Bray c 2003 Miramax Films. All rights reserved
to “Eyes Wide Shut” where she plays a doctor’s wife who memorably mocks her husband’s pretensions to fidelity, leading him on a strange existential quest in search of himself (I should mention Tom Cruise is just as good if not better than she is in that one).
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There is also Dogville, Danish director Lars Von Trier’s cruel masterpiece, where she plays a gangster’s daughter whose compassion for a midwestern town in the pit of the depression leads to her sexual exploitation by all the members of the town who take advantage of her self-sacrificing Christian morality.
Rolf Konow
The excellent HBO series “Big Little Lies” where she plays a wife whose husband physically abuses her, the abuse to which she and he are each twistedly addicted—Nicole Kidman clearly loves the tragic heroine. And perhaps that explains why she was drawn to Erin Bell.
HBO
Sheila O’malley, a writer for Ebert, ridiculed the role for drawing too much attention to Kidman’s transformational change of appearance. The critic seemed to be accusing her of self-glorification as she judged her appearance “distracting” and her performance “overwrought.”
Since I read it, I’ve been chafing at this review. I considered it on its merits, but I find the opinion unjustifiably cynical and ridiculous. It’s a terrible misunderstanding. Nicole Kidman did not choose this role in an attempt to transcend earlier ones, where she was pretty and sweet or something. On the contrary, she chose this role only to better express and delve into and perfect what she does best— the art of playing Nicole Kidman. For this critic to misjudge her for contriving to transform into something different, egotistically, and floundering: is for her to fail to appreciate that Nicole Kidman in Destroyer is more authentically Nicole Kidman than Nicole Kidman perhaps ever was in any earlier role. For Nicole Kidman all throughout her prolific career, has sought to transfigure the fundamental frailty of the human condition into a sublime, radical art.
In the all of her roles that I’ve seen, she has been a fierce, tragic, complicated, vulnerable, isolated, frustrated and anguished soul, always at a loss, yet striving willfully for redemption in a bleak universe, coldly indifferent to her fate. If Nicole Kidman in “Destroyer” chose to be an alcoholic cop with hardly the will to live, who can barely stand up, shifting hoarsely across the movie screen, then this is one of her most sincere and brutally honest performances so far.
For Nicole Kidman fans and moviegoers in general, I think this is a very exciting installment in the actress’s evolution as an artist.
—Jay