Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours
Director: Karyn Kusama
Quick Impressions:
Nicole Kidman is everywhere lately. I keep seeing her clapping at the Golden Globes, giving birth to Aquaman, interviewing Amy Adams, rescuing her gay son from conversion therapy, eating bugs, appearing on the movie poster for that unnecessary remake of Intouchables. Seriously, this afternoon I’m taking little ice cream cups to my daughter’s fourth grade class to celebrate her birthday, and I’m bringing an extra one for Nicole Kidman because I’ll be more surprised if she isn’t there.
So I’m going to be totally honest. Emily Blunt’s BAFTA snub has left me feeling unsettled about Best Actress. When the Oscar nominations are announced, Blunt might not make the cut. (Unlike the British Academy, apparently), I loved her performance in Mary Poppins Returns. (If she wants Mary Poppins to sound like Princess Margaret, who am I to object?) But I do wish she didn’t disappear for such a long stretch in the film’s final act. I mean, towards the end there, Mary Poppins was gone so long that when Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury showed up, I started to worry that maybe she had been murdered.)
So if Emily Blunt isn’t nominated, then who will take her place? I doubt it will be BAFTA’s pick Viola Davis because I’ve been feeling for a while now that I’m the only person in the United States who liked Widows.
But if confused Academy members find themselves looking around for a worthy nominee, they’re bound to notice the conspicuous Nicole Kidman. (How can you miss her? Like I said, she’s everywhere!)
I recently watched the Variety Actors-on-Actors segment featuring Kidman and Amy Adams, and I took two things away from their interview.
1) Nicole Kidman really wants to do a project where she and Amy Adams play sisters (like really, really, really to the point that I might be starting to get a bit frightened if I were Amy Adams).
2) Nicole Kidman made a pledge to do a film with a female director at least once every 18 months, and that’s one of the reasons she signed on to Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer.
I thought, “If Kidman gets a surprise nomination, I need to see this, and even if she doesn’t, it seems like a cool project, and I kind of want to see it, anyway.”
And I’m glad I did. I went for the Kidman performance, but this film is far more enjoyable than most movies I see because one of the actors might get an Oscar nomination.
Destroyer is a good movie. It’s a gritty detective story, like a film noir in color. I could easily imagine Humphrey Bogart in Kidman’s part. (Of course, I also kept imagining him in Ethan Hawke’s role in First Reformed, so maybe I just find it too convenient to imagine Humphrey Bogart.)
Kidman does, indeed, give one of her strongest performances (though many of her performances are strong. She’s had a good, if unusual, career). But even if you’re not crazily obsessed with the Oscars like I am, this is a good movie, entertaining, surprising, and ultimately pretty satisfying.
The Good:
Destroyer is the kind of movie that you would get sucked into if you happened across it on TV by accident (and unless Kidman does get a surprise Oscar nomination, this is probably how most people actually will see it).
It has a plot that’s interesting and complex (complicated even). My husband remarked afterwards that the movie “seemed a lot longer than two hours, not in a bad way, but because so much information was packed into” its runtime.
As we watch, we’re trying to solve the mystery, but we’re simultaneously trying to figure out what exactly the mystery is. And the more we learn about the crime, the more we learn about our protagonist, hard-boiled, hard-working, hard-drinking, heard-headed, hard-nosed, hard-bodied, hard-to-reach, hard-to-get-along-with police detective (and longshot for Mother of the Year) Erin Bell. In a way, she’s just as enigmatic to the audience as the mystery she is trying to solve.
Kidman is absolutely magnificent as Bell, though I think it’s somewhat misleading to claim that she’s deglamorized for this role. That’s what I’ve been hearing about her turn in Destroyer for months, that her Oscar odds might be better because she’s uglied up to play a haggard alcoholic. Sorry but she’s never been more beautiful. In fact, even “ugly” she looks far more attractive than she usually does when all glammed up for awards shows. These days, there’s often something very ethereal and almost eerie about Kidman’s appearance, like she’s only passing for human when she’s really from another plane of existence. But her “weathering” make-up humanizes her. You don’t look at her and think, “Can this hideous creature actually be Nicole Kidman?” No, you think, “This poor, gorgeous woman needs to see a doctor urgently.” (I mean, she looks sick and horribly weathered by years of rough living, but underneath all that, she’s still Nicole Kidman.)
I’m only commenting so much on her appearance because I think it’s relevant to her Oscar chances. This is not like Charlize Theron in Monster. Kidman’s character looks like she’s done some hard living, but she’s still quite attractive when you get past the decades of high stress and substance abuse. Kidman was actually much less attractive than this when she wore a false nose to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours (for which she did win an Oscar).
The other thing is that much of the story is parceled out to us in increasingly revealing flashbacks of Bell’s past, over sixteen years earlier. Kidman also plays the younger Bell, and in those scenes, she doesn’t look like a spectral, weathered alcoholic at all. She looks great.
While watching, I couldn’t help but think in delight, “With all the make-up she uses in this performance, Nicole Kidman actually could have played this exact same role twenty years ago, when she was more the age of Flashback Erin.” That’s actually really cool.
In the flashback scenes, she does look much younger, but not in a distracting way. I suspect they used light special effects to help de-age her, but my husband thinks it was just make-up, and he could be right. Nicole Kidman does not look like most people and could probably play someone of any age in the right make-up. Ordinarily when I see someone in a movie made up to be much older or younger, I think, “Hmm, well this is kind of fake and a little distracting, but it won’t last long,” but here, present and past seem equally real and vivid. Kidman has amazing moments in both time periods. In fact, I think her strongest moment comes in one of the flashbacks.
The movie makes helpful (and ultimately fascinating) use of flashbacks. I loved the director’s habit of treating us to a brief flashback every time we hear a name, see a face, visit a place that we need to know. That’s a nice refresher that helps us keep track of all the major players without a lot of clunky exposition. (And there’s something more I’d like to say about the clever use of flashbacks, but it would be a spoiler.)
Visually, the movie has a number of striking scenes. I liked the score a lot, too, especially the main theme. The plot features some genuine surprises that you really feel. And the supporting cast is uniformly strong. Sebastian Stan is the standout of the flashbacks, and Bradly Whitford has a nice moment (as a not-so-nice guy) present day. I always wanted to see more of Toby Kebbell, who felt more like a ghost than a fully realized character, although eventually I understood what was going on with him. I wanted to know more about Scoot McNairy’s Ethan, too, but I guess he’s just the guy with a less interesting backstory than the other people in his life. Beau Knapp does an amazing job of playing the guy who seems like the biggest creep in a story about criminals, and Jade Pettyjohn perfectly captures the longing masked as insolence of Bell’s daughter Shelby.
But Kidman’s performance is the reason to see the movie. Her work here is exceptional, and whether she gets an Oscar attention or not, this is a definite highlight in her (immensely varied and accomplished) filmography.
Best Scene:
I’m a big fan of the Russian Roulette scene. At first, I thought, ,”This is showing us a lot about Arturo (Zach Villa),” but eventually I realized it’s showing us a lot more than that. Destroyer is overflowing with symbolism and foreshadowing, and what happens here reveals so much and also echoes some major developments we see later on.
Best Scene Visually:
Something we see extremely late in the movie is such an effective piece of visual symbolism. (To mention it explicitly would be a spoiler, but it has to do with color.)
I also liked the scene featuring the ant because it made me wonder what that crazy ant was up to, all by itself.
Best Action Sequence:
I love Bell’s pursuit of older Arturo (older Zach Villa) because it seems so spooky and off-kilter and desperate, and it culminates in my husband’s favorite visual of the movie.
Taken together, the two bank robbery scenes are captivating, too. Kidman is absolutely riveting, past and present. These are among the strongest scenes of the film.
I also found the owl-witnessed scene with Toby (James Jordan) extremely uncomfortable and telling and exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from an Oscar-baity film starring Nicole Kidman who seems to enjoy exploring what is uncomfortable.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Nicole Kidman:
Kidman has another celebrated film performance out there this year, playing the ultimately supportive mom in Boy Erased. The fact that Academy members could vote to nominate her in lead for Destroyer or supporting for Boy Erased probably hurts her chances, but the two vastly different performances also highlight her versatility. Her star turn as Erin Bell is stronger than her supporting work as Jared’s mom on every level, so if Kidman does pull off a nomination, I hope it’s for Destroyer.
Her strongest scene comes in one of the flashbacks near the end of the movie. Her last big, face-to-face conversation with Chris is electrifying. The past has never been so alive. My husband loved another late scene, set to look eerily similar, a conversation in the present between Erin and her daughter.
My husband, actually, prefers this performance to Glenn Close’s (excellent) turn in The Wife because “Nicole Kidman plays the character in the past and present,” whereas Close’s daughter Annie Stark plays the much younger version of her. (My husband also thinks Melissa McCarthy is the one who may miss the nomination.)
The full revelation of these two sides to Erin Bell helps us to form a complete picture of the character, and Kidman is just as intense and excellent in her past as in her present. That she gets to portray both aspects of Erin so fully is unusual, and it highlights her tremendous talent.
Though I have not seen all of Kidman’s performances, I can say that she’s better here than I’ve ever seen her, certainly much more impressive here than as Virginia Woolf, the role that won her the Oscar (“by a nose,” according to Denzel Washington).
I doubt she will get an Oscar (or even a nomination) for her work in Destroyer, but, nevertheless, she would be a deserving winner.
The Negatives:
The first part of the movie is slow, but the payoff ends up being so immense that I didn’t really care.
The early scenes of the film seem to lack focus and driving energy. This is partially because the audience is a little confused. We’re not entirely sure what we’re watching yet, so we don’t know what we’re supposed to see.
But the movie more than makes up for this initial lack of energy and focus in its intense, driven final act. Once we finally do figure out what has happened and what is happening, the story becomes so powerful, and every moment is electrifying thanks to Kidman.
Destroyer is a movie that is very careful about how it presents its story. The same basic plot, presented in a less artful way would not affect us as powerfully. Sure, we could be shown everything in a different order. We could know what was going on right from the start. But the story would not have the same emotional heft if elements of the ending were revealed to us in the beginning instead. So I’m okay with Destroyer‘s earliest sequences feeling a bit bland and vague because the power of the ending more than makes up for that small inconvenience.
The only other tiny complaint I had while watching is that the extremely thin Erin Bell endures a staggering amount of physical abuse. I thought the level of violence against her was unrealistically extreme at first, but eventually I changed my mind.
Overall:
I liked Destroyer much more than I thought I would. Nicole Kidman is phenomenal and deserves an Oscar (which she won’t get), and the story itself is carefully crafted and well told. Think of a gritty film about a surly, misanthropic, alcoholic police detective. I can readily imagine versions of this story starring Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, any number of male actors, actually. But this time, it’s Nicole Kidman seeking answers and expiation on the streets of LA. (California is what’s deglamorized in this film.) Erin Bell won’t stop until she’s found her man and the guilty party has paid fully for the crime. If you’re looking for a movie that is actually good in the bleak widwinter of the January box office, you might want to check out Destroyer.