NICOLE KIDMAN

CAREFUL SHIFTING OF FEMININE AND MASCULINE CHARACTER TRAITS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Nicole Kidman often acts like a binary clone of the perfectly balanced professional – delivering role specific performances with authenticity and honesty that reflect the new era of women transitioning into upper middle class, educated professional positions in society.

Humanity though is not without faults and the heroes Kidman has portrayed within society are no exception regardless of gender.

In The Interpreter (2005) Kidman’s character moves methodically through the scenes as an interpreter at the United Nations, listening more than talking, plotting with her inner voice more than risk taking in public. As the narrative unwinds, the character’s inner conflict becomes more revealed.

In the HBO television movie, Hemmingway and Gellhorn (2012), Martha Gellhorn wants to be at the frontlines of history during the Spanish Civil War and the D-Day landings. Kidman plays Gellhorn becoming a hardened female war correspondent, but her inner character has not become too cold so as to miss an opportunity for love with the already famous novelist, Ernest Hemmingway.

Clive Owen costars with Kidman. Owen plays Hemmingway as if the world famous novelist was the last real man standing, drinking heavily throughout the day and womanized the beautiful ladies throughout the night.

Gellhorn was in her own class even when romantically engaged with Hemmingway.

Kidman compiles a character study of Gellhorn and female war correspondents by creating a masculine voice and letting the make-up department modify her outer appearance to resemble the biopic character.

Time and time again, the talented actor transforms her inner personality and sacrifices her outer beauty for performances that immerse the audience into the material.

In Hemmingway and Gellhorn, the film narrative frequently flashes back to authentic news reel footage to highlight the biographical nature of the material. The dramatized narrative then gradually transitions into a cepion film finish that imagines Kidman and Owen dramatizing inside the news reel footage.

What Kidman also does best is balance the feminine and masculine components of the character’s personality in a way that highlights the human frailties within the perfectly developed image.

Kidman reuses these acting tools from film project to film project to create several distinct characters in different professional roles throughout the course of one of the more successful film careers.

Novelist Virginia Woolf gets the Kidman treatment in The Hours (2002). Kidman’s Woolf character shares the screen with characters developed by Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Ed Harris.

The film itself is a masterpiece that carries the actors through three intertwined narratives. Kidman is Woolf writing the novel titled Mrs. Dalloway, in 1928, while Moore’s Laura Brown reads the book in 1952, and Streep’s Clarissa Vaughan becomes the personification of the novels’ protagonist much later, while Harris plays Woolf’s doppelganger, Richard Brown.  

Kidman won the Oscar for best performance by an actor, creating a writer’s voice, wearing a prosthetic nose, and developing an inner personality with bipolar traits that eventually drives the writer to commit suicide.

Kidman shows how Woolf was the head of a matriarchic family structure, but she also made dramatic changes to what family meant with decidedly feminine characteristics of persuasion.

The Hours is an intellectually sophisticated film that uses Virginia Woolf’s inner voice as a narrative device and then gradually resolves her inner turmoil by intertwining the three distinct narratives until the climactic ending.

Woolf is shown as a talented writer with real life personality flaws.

In Batman Forever (1995) the psychiatrist holds a bit of distain for the characteristics she has observed about the wealthy bachelor, Bruce Wayne, but the little details lead her to gradually fall in love with her subject, while playing a cat and mouse game with Wayne’s alter ego.

Kidman takes this balanced duality in her characters to the point of caricature when she goes back home to film Australia (2008), costarring Hugh Jackman as the ‘Drover’.

Lady Sarah Ashley is a British heiress of a large scale cattle ranch in Australia. When Kidman’s character arrives, she learns of her husband’s death, which forces her into taking on the task of having to drive two thousand head of cattle to the dockyards after firing her ranch hands in a fit of justice.

Kidman’s character uses her powers of persuasion to convince Jackman’s character to take over the cattle drive, but then she also roles up her sleeves and joins the crew in learning how to drive cattle across Australia’s rugged landscape.

Lady Sarah Ashley is a bit of a sheltered prude, but she soon learns to compromise her aristocratic personality during the rugged journey through the outback.

Again, Kidman’s development of the character is directly linked to the task at hand. The aristocrat is almost comically feminine as she arrives from England off a boat to collect her luggage, but the ranch owner she becomes as the narrative reverses, with two thousand cattle at the navy docks in Darwin, is more balanced with more masculine traits.

Kidman then takes on Hollywood royalty in the Grace of Monaco (2014). Grace Kelly had become an international movie star before being swept off her feet by Prince Rainier of Monaco. This biopic shows how Kelly endured an identity crisis testing the political limits of her new role inside the tiny principality. Kidman shows how Kelly is too masculine when voicing her political views inside a patriarchic society. Tim Roth plays Prince Rainier delicately persuading Kelly to be more traditional in her role as Princess and mother of their three children.

Kidman sheds all grace a few years later as a worn out Los Angeles police detective in Destroyer (2018).

Kidman goes through a makeover to appear street worn, but she also relies on a voice and body language to depict the broken spirit of a detective that has lost almost all self-respect.

Kidman’s character begins acting to perfect her role as an undercover cop in a girlfriend and boyfriend team planted inside a criminal organization.

Humanity goes sideways as the undercover cops become torn between stopping a bank heist, by the Los Angeles street gang they have infiltrated, and taking some of the stolen cash for their retirement fund while remaining undercover.

Kidman shows most of all how the detective work on the Los Angeles city streets gradually takes away her character’s femininity to the detriment of that careful balancing of personality traits within her.

Kidman, throughout her career, has dramatized social roles, as opposed to gender roles, with a complicated singular purpose that more often than not avoids stereotypes and drives the narrative with the distinctiveness of the film character.

The entertaining film performances resonate with audiences for the artful telling of the true nature of the human endeavor.

Kidman is seldom the same character from film to film, and more often than not shows a bit of brilliance by going through a complete transformation for the film role.