Gus Van Sant (1995)
In a snow-covered cemetery in the New Hampshire town of Little Hope (fictitious, meaningfully named), a press pack gatecrashes a funeral procession, falling over each other to get to the graveside action. Gus Van Sant then intercuts shots of the female chief mourner with a montage of tabloid press stories and photographs, including ones taken at the funeral. The text ranges from banner headlines to small print. Words you can hardly fail to make out include ‘weather (girl) reporter is possible suspect’, ‘motive’, ‘seduced’, ‘lost my virginity’ and ‘violence’. They appetise, make the smaller, elusive text tantalise. On the soundtrack, Danny Elfman’s sprightly music gives way to a woman’s voiceover:
‘Here’s what I found out. That all of life is a learning experience. Everything is part of a big… master plan. But sometimes it’s- Well, it’s hard to read. It’s like if you get too close to the screen… all you can see is a bunch of little dots. You don’t see the big picture until you stand back. But when you do… everything comes into focus.’
As she speaks, the camera vindicates exactly what she’s saying. It moves in so close to a newspaper picture of the girl who dominated the opening visuals that a bunch of magnified little dots is indeed all that we see. The newspaper pages, in black and white, were co-ordinated with the snow and the mourning clothes in the funeral scene. So when Van Sant switches to a close-up of the young woman we glimpsed there (at first in shades) and in the tabloids, and whose voice we’ve been hearing, the advent of colour is arresting: blonde hair, blue eyes, pink lipstick, gold earrings, red nail varnish – the last visible as she speaks of her recently deceased husband and holds up a tissue to dab tears from her eyes. She (Nicole Kidman) introduces herself:
‘Suzanne Maretto. No, wait. I’m sorry. Suzanne Maretto is my married name. My own name… is Suzanne Stone. That’s my professional name. It’s not like I have any negative feelings about the name Maretto. Maretto is the name, after all…of my husband…who I loved…very, very much.’
The effect of all this is funny, intriguing and exhilarating: thanks especially to the montage (designed by Pablo Ferro), To Die For gets off to a great start. Yet you wonder immediately how Van Sant can sustain this. He has already, if not given away, at least heavily hinted at quite a lot. In the cemetery Suzanne wasn’t oppressed by the intrusive press cameras but seemed rather to like their attention and keen to give them hers – not what you expect of a young widow, unless she’s a black widow. The newspaper headlines reinforce our impression that Suzanne isn’t just an exceptionally pretty face. Everything she’s so far said, on or off camera, suggests radiant, rampant egotism, limited intelligence allied to limitless self-belief.
What follows takes the form of a mockumentary about the now notorious Suzanne Stone and events leading up to the murder of her husband Larry (Matt Dillon), the narrative comprising interviews and flashback dramatisation. Those speaking to camera include, as well as Suzanne, her parents (Kurtwood Smith and Holland Taylor) and sister Faye (Susan Traylor); Larry’s parents (Dan Hedaya and Angela Maretto) and sister (Illeana Douglas); and two high school students who got to know Suzanne – Lydia Mertz (Alison Folland) and Jimmy Emmett (Joaquin Phoenix). The latter appears to be talking from a prison cell.
Suzanne is seriously determined to be a television star. Dim Larry adores her. His Italian-American parents run a local restaurant. Suzanne marries him for the financial security she needs until she becomes rich and famous. After getting a secretarial job at a local cable TV station, she uses her wearying keenness and persistence to persuade her boss Ed Grant (Wayne Knight) to let her present weather reports. Suzanne has plenty of other ideas to suggest to Ed for new and original programmes, starring herself – like ‘me going to local movie theaters…talking to the people coming out to see what they really think’.
Ed lets her visit a local high school to interview kids there, and make a documentary (‘Teens Speak Out’). Alarmed by the strength of her husband’s and in-laws’ assumption that she’ll soon give up work for motherhood, Suzanne urgently needs to address the issue. Jimmy Emmett soon presents himself as a potential problem-solver. He’s crazy about Suzanne, ecstatic when she seduces him and they start a relationship, ready to do whatever she wants. What she wants is for Jimmy, assisted by his school pal Russell Hines (Casey Affleck) and Lydia, to kill her husband.
Joyce Maynard’s 1992 novel To Die For was inspired by the real-life killing of Gregg Smart in New Hampshire, two years previously. The murder was committed by his wife Pamela’s fifteen-year-old lover and three of the boy’s friends. Pamela – convicted of conspiracy to murder, being an accomplice to murder, and witness tampering – is serving a life sentence. Unlike her, Suzanne lies so successfully that she’s released on bail. Her lethal prioritisation of success and celebrity is also the novel’s invention. Not having read it, I don’t know if Maynard opts for entirely heartless satirical comedy or is at pains to point up the serious consequences of the protagonist’s ambition. As the screen adaptation of To Die For proceeds, Gus Van Sant seems to be aiming for an equilibrium of comedy and drama but the result, though mostly entertaining, isn’t fully satisfying. Van Sant is working against the grain of Buck Henry’s witty but glib screenplay.
Like the much more recent Nightcrawler (2014), To Die For uses a pathological individual to illustrate a larger cultural pathology. Yet the passage of time has made Suzanne’s tunnel-vision careerism now seem, if not harmless, less appalling than some of the latter-day consequences of celebrity culture and cosmetic obsession. There are nice details: Suzanne solemnly propounds that Mikhail Gorbachev might still be leading Russia ‘if he’d done… what many people suggested and had that big purple thing taken off his forehead’; her lapdog Walter is named for Walter Cronkite. Even so, the fact that she has enough historical perspective to have heard of Cronkite, already retired from broadcasting for more than a decade, is almost creditable.
Crucial elements of the plot depend on antique ethnic clichés. The heir to a single albeit successful family restaurant seems a surprisingly modest choice of meal ticket for Suzanne until you realise how much the Italian-American background is going to matter. Her in-laws’ reversion to stereotype in their preoccupation with her bearing children anticipates the black comedy denouement. Suzanne is lured to a meeting with a man she believes is her passport to further fame and fortune. He’s actually a hitman: Larry’s father has used his Mafia connections to arrange a revenge killing. The last shot of Suzanne shows her corpse beneath the surface of a frozen lake. On the ice above, Larry’s figure-skating sister Janice practises her moves. The routine has an air of quiet, macabre celebration.
If long retrospect renders the film’s cultural critique less than startling, it strengthens the impact of the casting of the main part and two others. As Suzanne, Nicole Kidman, twenty-seven at the time, has a lustrous nastiness. There’s rarely a smile in Suzanne’s eyes but the one usually on her face is so dazzling that its withdrawal is startling. Presenting the weather reports, she has such beauty and inane verve that you wonder she isn’t snapped up instantly for bigger things. The character’s intense self-belief excludes the possibility not just of being wrong but of a sense of humour yet Kidman is funny in this role as never before or (so far) since. She portrays Suzanne with elating precision. Along with the television series Big Little Lies, this is her best screen work.
In his first cinema role, nineteen-year-old Casey Affleck is spot on as the lewd, insolent punk Russell. Sprawling across his school desk as Suzanne meets the class for the first time, he looks as if he wants sex with everything – if the glamorous visitor isn’t available, the desk will do. Just a year older than Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix looks extraordinary and gives Jimmy a singular vulnerability – a combination that does a lot to transcend the breezy satire vs real tragedy tension inherent in To Die For. These three major actors of the future both amuse and engage with the characters they’re playing. They never seem – against the odds – to despise them.
Some other characterisations, though good, are realistic in a way that excludes laughter. Alison Folland’s shy, glum, anxious Lydia, even though she finally and ironically becomes a media celebrity herself, is an example. Matt Dillon doesn’t fully convince as a man thick and besotted enough to take Suzanne at her own, outrageous estimation. Illeana Douglas is more successful. Her eccentric looks and acute comic delivery leaven Janice’s anguish but the stabs of realism in her angry grief – like the moments in which Joaquin Phoenix shows Jimmy’s genuine distress – are a reminder of how tricky a tonal challenge the material presents.
Writing in Time magazine in the year of its release, Richard Corliss described To Die For as ‘a classy collision between the chipper misanthropy of scriptwriter Buck Henry and the eroticising of dopey young sociopaths found in director Gus Van Sant’s earlier work (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho)’. There’s truth in this summary, though Van Sant is often struggling to balance the two things. And sometimes succeeding. A mocking highlight is Suzanne’s choice of music for the ceremony at Larry’s graveside: Eric Carmen’s ‘All By Myself’ (‘Don’t wanna be…‘) is a perfect, very funny expression of her complete hypocrisy and egocentricity. A moment that’s more ambiguous but equally effective arrives at the end of Suzanne’s final address to camera. She gets up, flicks a switch and removes a videotape from a machine. We’ve assumed throughout that she’s the star of someone else’s mockumentary rather than recording herself. It’s rather touching to see her still relying on DIY efforts to further her career. She’s confident the tape will enable her to put a bigger asking price on her screen story – when she shows it to the man who’s going to kill her.
15 June 2019
