Nicole Kidman [Anglais] [Relié]

Thomson's love letter to Kidman is less a biography than a long and winding meditation on moviemaking and starmaking. Thomson attempts to chronicle the actress's personal life based on her statements to the media, her choice of roles and an interview with her, but the bulk of this account consists of his inferences and analysis, including the observation that actors project what they expect we, the public, want them to be. His angle on Kidman is a question: is she sincere in her actions and true to herself? The real question is, how much do we care? Following absorbing sections about her youth in Australia and beginnings as a talented newcomer in Hollywood, Thomson (The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood) constructs a time line of Kidman's movies, giving near-equal weight to her breakthrough in To Die For and her Oscar-winning role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours as to a string of duds (Birth, The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter). For Thomson, the failures offer fertile—or, sometimes for the reader, tiresome—opportunities to reimagine casting, directing and story. Omnivorous movie buffs might appreciate Thomson's take on Hollywood, but US Weekly readers won't have the stamina for his blend of star worship and criticism. (Sept.)
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Thomson's bizarre paean to his favorite actress is ostensibly a meticulous study of an actress's career adumbrated by meditations on the nature of stardom. He analyzes the art films that test Kidman's dramatic powers and the commercial dross that pays the servants, and which he clearly feels is unworthy of her. A true obsessive, Thomson seems to have logged every detail of Kidman's public life; of an appearance in In Style, we learn that "on pages 332-33 . . . she is stretched out on a pink sofa." Ultimately, though, we hear much more about Thomson. In addition to his views on Kidman—her marriage, her boyfriends, "the curve of her bottom," and her forehead, which he hopes is not botoxed—he tells us about such matters as the time he met Katharine Hepburn and a play he once directed. What begins as an analysis of stardom ends up as a case study of fandom.
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Not long ago, someone asked me that old chestnut about which book I'd take to a desert island. I was expected to say, oh, Middlemarch or Middle Earth or Khalil Gibran. I answered David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film -- on the grounds that it was the least exhaustible book I could think of. And if a fellow has to wake up every morning under the same coconut tree, he could find worse company than Jean Arthur and Howard Hawks and Kenji Mizoguchi and Cary Grant. If you can't smuggle Margaret Sullavan onto your desert island, then meditating on her is the next best thing.

Consider this, too. The essays in Thomson's dictionary -- wide-angled and fine-grained, lyrically intuitive and closely reasoned -- are more than viewing aids, they are parallel artworks. And, best of all for the desert-island reader, they come robed in melancholy, for Thomson understands at some level that he is chronicling cinema's decline and fall -- and, of course, his own. Each critic is killed by the thing he loves.

Those who share that love find themselves in the backward position of wishing that today's movies and movie stars could be worthy of their greatest critics. Nothing in "The Da Vinci Code" was as dismaying as watching New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane empty his quiver into it. And nothing speaks so strongly to our diminished field of play as seeing David Thomson hash out an entire book on the subject of Nicole Kidman (after already devoting a chapter to her in The Whole Equation). It smacks of disproportion, unseemliness: Professor Rath burying his nose in Lola Lola's garter. The mind quickly glides toward worthier obsessions, toward Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Julianne Moore, even Charlize Theron. But Thomson isn't budging. It's Nicole or nothing. "I don't say she's the greatest actress ever, or even the best of her time," he says, only "the bravest, the most adventurous, and the most varied of her time."

Ardor, at least, hasn't swamped his critical faculty. He sifts through Kidman's catalogue with persistence and jagged bolts of insight. Nobody sees things quite the way David Thomson does. Suzanne, the homicidal anti-heroine of "To Die For" (still Kidman's best performance) "is photographed like an advertisement for ripe fruit," with "an excess of light the way carefully concealed banks of light fall on the produce in a supermarket." Satine, the doomed showgirl of "Moulin Rouge," descends "on a strawberry red umbilical cord . . . strutting her long white thighs as if they were the hands on life's clock."

Thomson is particularly fine in shaking out the gold and dross from "The Hours," which he regards less as a paean to Virginia Woolf than as "a kind of tribute to the tradition or example set down by Meryl Streep." As for Kidman's Oscar-winning performance, he is both admiring and skeptical. "This Mrs. Woolf," he writes, "is too fierce and strong to go into the river. . . . [She] might have proved a sturdy figure in some resistance movement, tender in sensibility yet prepared to learn how to break a Nazi neck."

There is, yes, a vein of disappointment in Thomson's mash note, the sense of a field running gently fallow. As the years pass and the betrayals mount -- "The Stepford Wives," "The Interpreter," the Kabuki spectacle of Botox-Kidman rising up at awards-show podiums -- you can feel Thomson kneading his scalp at each misstep. Did she have to pose for that In Style cover? Did she have to whore herself out to Chanel No. 5? For the love of God, did she have to make "Bewitched"?

Chivalrously, he tries to attribute Kidman's erratic progress to phenomena outside her control: The problem of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, let's say, or the "total and uncomplaining addiction to being someone else" that eventually cripples every actor. He wants Kidman, in short, to be the alabaster emblem of the cinema's own contradictions, but the more he plumps for her larger relevance, the more he reinforces how private his obsession really is.

Which is undoubtedly all obsession can ever be. In a revealing moment, Kidman even invades Thomson's dreams, dressed as the Catherine Deneuve prostitute from "Belle de Jour" and pleasuring a Gestapo officer and an "elderly Chinaman." Thomson awakes, refreshed, and pours himself a cup of tea. "Then my wife came in. We greeted each other quite fondly. She wondered what I might like for dinner. I gave the matter every thought and I was about to answer. Then she yawned and said how tiring her afternoons were these days. Perhaps she'd let herself have a nap before dinner, if I didn't mind waiting. She took off her earrings and was asleep before I could reply."

An oddly poignant set piece: slumbering spouses and phantom love affairs. It made me wonder whom his wife was dreaming of. And it left me rooting for David Thomson to stay awake.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard
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There are star biographies, full of fluff, and then there are real biographies, full of substance. This is one of the latter. The author does give readers the kind of information they're accustomed to getting from the typical star bio--Kidman's feet are size 10, for example--but he also delivers lots of things you don't usually find in a book with a star's name on it. A legitimately critical appraisal of the star's work, for example. Or, in this case, a fascinating study of the rise of the Australian film industry and its impact on the North American box office, and an incisive analysis of today's top female actors and Kidman's place among them. Celebrity biographers tend to worry about the next interview or the next book deal and consequently do a lot of tiptoeing; Thomson, a noted film historian, says what he thinks. For example, he calls Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer's films, such as Top Gun and Days of Thunder, "neofascist bombast." And he doesn't pull any punches when discussing some of Kidman's less-than-stellar film work. By putting his subject's life in its professional and historical context, and by shooting straight from the hip, the author gives us a full-size, honest portrait of Kidman--and a revealing look at Hollywood movies and the stars who make them. David Pitt
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