24 Hours of Movies: Kidman!

 by Patrick Bromley

We come to this place for magic.

She has an Oscar, she has a few high-profile marriages and one higher profile divorce, she appears in every third prestige movie and TV show released these days, but for some reason Nicole Kidman rarely gets talked about in conversations about our great working movie stars. I suspect it's because she works so much and doesn't always have the best quality control -- in other words, she's ubiquitous and there's a lot of red on her balance sheet. But she deserves to be celebrated, not just for her incredible body of work but also for putting her money where her mouth is and supporting female directors. Kidman walks the walk. Let's celebrate her the best way we know how.

10 am - Days of Thunder (1990, dir. Tony Scott)

We'll kick things off with Nicole Kidman's star-making role in the Tony Scott/Tom Cruise racecar drama Days of Thunder, which is also the film on which the two stars fell in love and later married until the stress of making a Stanley Kubrick movie broke them up. Kidman plays a pretty textbook love interest here, existing primarily to remind the Tom Cruise character (Cole Trickle!) that he is, in fact, awesome. Basically just a remake of Top Gun with cars, Days of Thunder is thin material (story by Tom Cruise!) elevated by the performances and Tony Scott's direction, which makes anything watchable. This is a movie that has grown on me in the years since I first saw it if only because it is, as I'm fond of saying, "functional" in a way that fewer and fewer movies are now.

Noon - BMX Bandits (1983, dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith)

Returning to the early work of Kidman -- let's call it Kidman Begins -- for a shot of goofy Australian fun courtesy of exploitation master Brian Trenchard-Smith. Kidman plays one of a group of BMX riding teens who tangle with some criminals in very PG ways. The movie plays like a cable staple even if it wasn't; it has real '80s HBO energy, perfect for early in our marathon when we're still feeling great and have the patience of this sort of goofiness.

1:30 pm - Malice (1993, dir. Harold Becker)

It's never too early in the day for a '90s erotic thriller. As someone who has been championing this movie for years, it has been very rewarding to see it finding new fans (none more than Adam Riske) in the last half decade or so. Kidman gives one of my favorites of her performances as a schoolteacher married to Bill Pullman (another of my favorite actors) whose college friend-turned-surgeon-turned-tenant botches an operation on her and winds up in a lawsuit. That's just the setup, because where the script (by heavy hitters Scott Frank and Aaron Sorkin) goes from there is almost impossible to predict. Harold Becker's moody, noirish direction, an incredibly literate screenplay, and great performances from the main cast to the supporting roles elevate this trash to the A-list in the best way possible. I'm an unabashed lover of this movie.

3:30 pm - Margot at the Wedding (2007, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Kidman shines in Noah Baumbach's bitter, acrid comedy about an awful woman visiting her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and husband-to-be (Jack Black) amid tensions and dysfunction among, well, everyone because it's a Noah Baumbach movie. While clearly intelligent and well-acted, Margot is a tough pill because its characters are so unpleasant and unlikable. That's exactly why I'm programming it here -- because Kidman is so willing to be the worst and makes no attempt at endearing the character or her performance to the audience. How many huge movie stars can say the same? It's yet another thing I love about her as a movie star: she will always do what's best for the project, vanity be damned. She's like the anti-Rock.

5:00 pm - Stoker (2013, dir. Park Chan-wook)

Speaking of awful Kidman! She somehow manages to steal Park Chan-wook's English language debut out from beneath a pair of excellent performances playing a grieving woman who falls under the spell of her brother-in-law (Matthew Goode) against the protestations of her daughter (Mia Wasikowska). Park's loose re-telling of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt is impossibly gorgeous, dark, and fairly twisted in its sexuality as it explores the relationships between Goode and Kidman and Goode and Wasikowska. It's a great thriller, one that failed to make much of an impact and remains super under-discussed more than a decade later. I like that Kidman has made enough weird and fucked-up movies that we can start playing them this early and still have enough left over for the nighttime section of our marathon.

6:45 pm - To Die For (1995, dir. Gus Van Sant)

This might -- MIGHT -- be the absolute best Nicole Kidman has ever been on film because it combines so many things she does better than just about anyone into a single performance. Director Gus Van Sant's satirical black comedy (from a Buck Henry script, loosely based on the real-life case of Pamela Smart) casts Kidman as a small-town woman who values ambition and celebrity above all else and is willing to murder (or, better yet, get someone else to do the murdering) to get ahead. The actor gets to be funny, sexy, and the absolute worst all at the same time, successfully seducing every male character and the audience to the point that we convinced she's someone for whom anyone would commit a crime. Underseen until the recent Criterion 4K release, To Die For is one of the great movies of the mid-'90s and fully deserving of the Primetime Pizza slot.

8:30 pm - Dead Calm (1989, dir. Phillip Noyce)

As day turns to night and the sun goes down, let's play this excellent three-handed thriller that made me first take notice and fall in love with Nicole Kidman back in 1989. She and Sam Neill are a grieving married couple (Kidman is perpetually grieving on screen) who take an ocean trip and encounter a stranger (Billy Zane, cooking) who's been stranded at sea. Things go to shit pretty quickly from there. Tense and tight and at times insanely shocking (OMG that opening), Dead Calm is the best kind of sleeper thriller -- one I saw as a kid with zero expectations (it was my introduction to all three stars) and which wound up blowing me away. Even this early in her Hollywood career, Kidman was imbuing what could have easily been a damsel-in-distress role with intelligence and strength. 

10:15 pm - Destroyer (2018, dir. Karyn Kusama)

A recent rewatch of this one is what put me onto a Kidman kick and inspired this marathon. I love how fearless Kidman is in her performances and I love that she set a goal to work with more female directors and is actually doing it, having worked on nearly 30 female-helmed projects in the last few years alone. Her collaboration with director Karyn Kusama seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle when it barely got released in 2018, but it's a terrific movie, part character study and part neo-noir about a cop (Kidman) whose undercover stint ended tragically, sending her on a mission of revenge to right some serious wrongs. I'm not sure the prosthetics/makeup are totally necessary, but everything else about this movie is tense and bleak and totally compelling, in particular Kidman's turn as a woman who has seen some shit and has the major scars to prove it. She doesn't usually get to go quite this dark.

12:30 - Eyes Wide Shut (1999, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

The movie that ended Kidman's 10-year relationship and marriage to co-star Tom Cruise is also the one in which she arguably gives her very best performance as wife to a doctor (Cruise) who, while very high one night, confesses some sexual fantasies to him that send him down a jealousy spiral and an all-night odyssey to prove he's desirable and/or get laid, at which (spoilers) he is comically unsuccessful at every turn. Kidman gives a monologue about a third of the way into the movie that's probably the best thing she's ever done and certainly the movie's tour de force sequence. I didn't know what to make of this movie in summer 1999 but it has gradually become a top 3 Kubrick for me, and I think programming it here in the overnight is perfect because so much of Eyes Wide Shut is meant to capture that weird state between sleeping and dreaming, a feeling it evokes better than almost any other movie.

3:00 am - The Others (2001, dir. Alejandro Amenábar)

A very Kidman ghost story! Teaming with Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar in his English language debut (the same year that her ex Tom Cruise starred in Vanilla Sky, a remake of Amenábar's Open Your Eyes), she plays a highly nervous and incredibly tightly-wound mother of two whose children are locked up in their Victorian mansion all the time because of their rare sensitivity to light. With the arrival of some new servants in the house, the family begins experiencing some strange and potentially supernatural goings on. I don't always have the patience for the Innocents brand of storytelling Amenábar is chasing, but I'd be lying if I said the movie isn't gorgeous and creepy and super atmospheric. Kidman achieves a kind of coldness here that I suspect too many consistently associate with her, but it's an unfair characterization. Yes, she has that available to her in her arsenal, but as this marathon demonstrates she's capable of doing way more than just that. She does it in The Others because it's what's best for the movie. I am your daughter!

4:45 am - Birth (2004, dir. Jonathan Glazer)

I know it's early/late and the sun will be coming up but that doesn't mean we can't still get weird. Nicole Kidman has always been great at a) recognizing filmmaker talent and collaborating with those people and b) leaning into the weirdness of any given material while finding a way to ground it in reality. Birth asks her to do exactly that. She and her pixie haircut play a grieving woman (see?) who becomes convinced that her recently-deceased husband's spirit has been reincarnated in a 10-year old boy (Cameron Bright, creepy as always). While it's my least favorite of the Jonathan Glazer films I've seen (I have yet to bring myself to watch The Zone of Interest), Birth is still meticulously made and challenging moviemaking, the kind from which Kidman has never been one to shy away.

6:45 am - Batman Forever (1995, dir. Joel Schumacher)

We'll have breakfast with this, the horniest of all Batman movies (yes, even more than Returns), which just recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. The late, great Val Kilmer steps in as the Caped Crusader taking in Robin (Chris O'Donnell) and taking on Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones, not sanctioning your buffoonery) and The Riddler (Jim Carrey). The big change here is obviously Joel Schumacher taking over as a director, adding a tone that's much more cartoonish, colorful, and campy than Tim Burton's brooding Gothic take. Kidman is at her most breathlessly hot as a psychiatrist who's horny for the guy in the costume, less so for Bruce Wayne. I know a lot of people bailed on the franchise as of this entry, but I'm still here for it for the Kilmer/Kidman/Schumacher of it all, less so for the TLJ and Jim Carrey. This movie is pure happiness. Let's wake up happy.

9:00 am - Moulin Rouge! (2001, dir. Baz Luhrmann)

We'll wrap up our marathon in spectacular fashion with a movie I've never totally loved but which I cannot argue is a lot of movie. Kidman sings and dances as a French actress and sex worker who falls in love with Ewan McGregor's writer character. No matter how much I've tried, I'm not really a Baz Luhrmann guy -- his brand of manic overindulgence is not mine -- but I can at least understand the appeal of Moulin Rouge!, particularly as a Kidman fan. She gives the movie a beating heart and some much needed gravitas (the same could be said for McGregor, but this is a Kidman marathon). I like the idea of closing on something big and splashy, and those words can certainly be used to describe Moulin Rouge!. This is a film that celebrates all of Kidman's talents. It only makes sense to end this way.