Karyn Kusama (2018)
Nicole Kidman’s eyes are never quite their usual selves in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer. In flashbacks to the time when detective Erin Bell was working undercover and (it emerges) in love with her colleague Chris (Sebastian Stan), the blue of Kidman’s peepers is unnaturally bright. They fade to grey in the film’s present, sixteen or so years later – and are co-ordinated with Erin’s ashy face, her somehow colourless hair, the alarming shadows below her eyes and, above all, her state of mind. There are those who think grim equals true and that actors cast against type transcend themselves: it’s no surprise that Kidman’s turn as a jaded, tough-talking cop, burned out by booze and worn down by life, has been praised by some critics as a career highpoint. They’re wrong, though – more obviously wrong because Destroyer arrives soon after what, for this viewer, is her best performance (so far), in the television series Big Little Lies (2017).
It’s to Kidman’s credit that she’s often made bold choices of role and admirable, in principle, that she took on the challenge of turning herself into a wrong-side-of-the-tracks woman nearly at the end of her tether but still fighting to face down her demons. (It really is difficult to describe this character in anything other than cliché.) But the result is awful in the wrong way. Kidman wears Erin’s scowl like a mask and, for the most part, delivers her lines in a hoarse, depressed whisper. That’s OK in her scenes with Jade Pettyjohn who, as Erin’s obstreperous teenage daughter, sounds relatively lively. Otherwise, the supporting cast (which includes Shamier Anderson, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Scoot McNairy, Zach Villa and Bradley Whitford) defer to the star and copy her exhausted monotone. In vocal terms, Destroyer is often a how-low-can-you-go contest: always a competitive performer, Kidman wins. More occasionally, Erins yells (usually ‘What the … fuck’) and, at one point, has a screaming/crying jag. Oddly enough, she’s upstaged in this bit – by the keening strings of Theodore Shapiro’s score. Karyn Kusama turns up the volume on Shapiro’s music just as Kidman is reaching the climax of her threnody.
Erin works for the LAPD but the precise location of the action is relatively unimportant: Destroyer is really taking place in Hell. The plot, it goes almost without saying, involves the protagonist’s settling old scores. (The screenplay is by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.) The film’s certificate caption carries a warning of strong language and strong violence (inter alia). The dialogue may be plausible for the dead-end characters but the expletives and their delivery are so unvarying that this soon feels like weak language. Although the violence is sometimes unpleasant, its abundance and Kusama’s routine staging similarly combine to dull impact.
31 January 2019
