BWhat more could be said about post-TV production,Big little lies Abundance of glossy thrillers? You know the type: Wealthy family. Female protagonist. Bestselling template. A picturesque setting shot with prestigious elegance. A big-name creator or director. A cast of famous actors, at least one of whom is an executive producer, dressed in quiet luxury, shooting big, emotional scenes. A murder or a sexual assault or a missing person. Every character has a secret or five, which means pretty much everyone is a suspect.
The perfect couplenow on Netflix, adheres so closely to these guidelines – and is so unabashedly superficial – that the only surprise is how much fun it squeezes out of a story that is full of soap operas and cliches. Susanne Bier (the Danish filmmaker best known today for HBO’s silly Lie track The downfall and the meme-bait Netflix movie Birdhouse) directs the adaptation of the novel by beach-reading eminence Elin Hilderbrand. Eve Hewson (a wonderful actress whose last contribution to this subgenre was Netflix’s ridiculous Behind her eyes) plays Amelia Sacks, a modest zoologist who is about to marry into the noble Winbury clan when a member of the wedding party is found dead on her Nantucket estate on the morning of the wedding. The star-studded cast includes Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, The White Lotus‘ Meghann Fahy and, somehow, the French film icon Isabelle Adjani. The biggest name is also the least surprising: Nicole Kidman. The Lie And The downfall The leading lady has become ubiquitous in a certain type of role in that certain type of project. Now, the very specific form of A-list overexposure is a more fascinating mystery than any crime drama in which she appears.
If The perfect couple is the quintessence of a series of this kind, then Kidman’s role as Amelia’s future mother-in-law Greer Garrison Winbury is the quintessential Kidman of the 2020s. The gorgeous matriarch of a wealthy family (see also: Lie, The downfall, Expats), Greer is, like her character in the latest Netflix film A family affaira successful author. As in Nine perfect strangers and again, Expatsher dark past is a source of pathos and tension. This type of Kidman character exudes an icy perfection that conceals inner turmoil. You can tell it’s dissolving as blush creeps into their porcelain faces, rims watery eyes and flares delicate nostrils.
Not all of these titles are thrillers. Expats downplays its mystery elements in favor of a grounded drama, A family affair is a romantic comedy that brings together A-list stars with a made-for-TV script. These are not the only projects Kidman has been involved in recently; since the second season of Lie aired in 2019, she also played Lucille Ball in The Ricardos areappeared in her second Aquaman Film and worked with her again Lie Husband Alexander Skarsgård for Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman (this time she was his mother) and other roles. What’s strange is that such a sought-after actress takes so much time away from similar work on the small screen, so that every few months she’s back on TV playing yet another rich mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
After all, this is the woman who is known for her portrayal of the restlessly intelligent Virginia Woolf in The hours and garnered nominations for everything from Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist musical Moulin-Rouge! To Lionan emotional drama of intercontinental appropriation. In the international arthouse sector, Kidman became the English-speaking answer to Adjani or Isabelle Huppert, embodying women pushed to their psychological limits. She offered her marriage to Tom Cruise for analysis in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes wide closedShe embodied a typically American kind of scapegoat in Lars von Trier’s harrowing Dogville. She crossed the boundaries of taste in Jonathan Glazer’s birthin which her widowed character meets a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her reincarnated husband. Her work on television is always solid; she is good in The perfect coupleBut the more she becomes pigeonholed into a particular role, the more her haunted mother characters seem like pastiches of the unique portrayals she delivered a few decades ago.
In interviews, Kidman repeatedly mentions two criteria for selecting projects. From an artistic point of view, she tends towards psychologically challenging characters. “I have pushed myself into places where I am not comfortable,” she said, explaining her attraction to The downfall Heroine Grace Fraser, a Manhattan therapist in denial about the true nature of her charming husband (Hugh Grant). “I’m interested in philosophy and the human psyche. I’m interested in stoicism.” It’s a thoughtful answer and a noble goal, but not necessarily one that inspires novelty. Kidman’s more recent characters may be complicated and layered, but their personalities, problems and lifestyles are often so similar that they’re largely interchangeable.
She also takes advantage of opportunities to work with women and promote their careers. To her great credit, she has far exceeded her 2017 promise to work with a female director every 18 months. (That promise may also explain why viewers have gotten to see so much of her: “I could rest,” she said in 2021, admitting that she was actually tired. “Or I could actually do what I promised.”) And she’s not just an actress. She founded a production company, Blossom Films, in 2010 and has served as executive producer on all of her recent television series. In the case of The perfect coupleShe shares this credit with Bier, Hilderbrand and the author and showrunner Jenna Lamia (Good girls). Kidman’s superstar presence plays a significant role in getting the shows and films she supports made. In a recent interview, she explained that many actors refuse to work with first-time directors, “but what I love is paving the way for filmmakers, writers, actors, people who haven’t had the opportunities that I have, and sharing that with them; betting on people who haven’t necessarily proven their worth yet; standing there and holding someone’s hand and walking through fire with them.”
In an industry where many of her peers pay lip service to inclusion but simply work with the same established white men, she is a fearless and unwavering promoter of new talent. Sometimes that mission results in work as daring as the films that made her reputation. Kidman made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last month with the sexually explicit Babygirlby Danish filmmaker Halina Reijn, in which she plays a tech executive torn between her devoted husband (Antonio Banderas) and a young intern (Harris Dickinson) who wants to live out her BDSM fantasies. Sometimes her ability to package a fresh voice in a way that is attractive to a studio or streamer may well be more important than specific artistic considerations. Expatsthat they with The farewell Author Lulu Wang for her first TV series, was her best show since the first season of Lie– but Kidman’s unstable character was among its least exciting elements. Nor would it be surprising if homegrown thrillers based on established intellectual properties were the kind of project for which Hollywood, in its eternal sexism, would be most likely to fairly compensate a 57-year-old leading lady and a young female director.
You would have to be a bigger snob than I am to be able to appreciate the mind-numbing joys of The perfect couple. Not every show has to be a masterpiece to be enjoyable, and being a great actor doesn’t require kneeling at the altar of cinema for your entire career (but thank you, Daniel Day-Lewis, for your service). Sometimes what’s healthy for the industry isn’t the same as what makes great art. Still, it can be boring to watch a performer capable of what Kidman is in Dogville And birth and even that one ad from AMC Theaters repeats itself so many times.
