From Publishers Weekly
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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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
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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Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker
