To what degree do we need to know about an actor’s life to appreciate his art? Are actors “artists” the way a writer is? Does the more we learn about his background inform our appreciation of the intentions behind the resulting work?

Actors are obviously important to a successful movie, yet at the higher levels of film studies it is the directors and sometimes writers who are granted full length critical studies, examinations of their careers film by film, or even book length studies of individual films. Sure, stars get their books. But they tend to be bios, usually derived, if the star is still living, from old interviews, gossip columns, and other bios.

Yet arguably the only reason ordinary non-academic movie viewing people go to movies is to see stars. Secondary they want a good story, or what is hoped will be a good story, based on the premise hinted at in the trailer or by word of mouth or seasonal lists in Sunday previews. But they use stars — to learn how to smoke, to flirt, to make snappy comebacks, and to hunt for others models. For me, Marlon Brando and James Dean got me through adolescence, providing characters though which to channel angst. From them, I transitioned to Jack Nicholson as an avatar of existential isolation. In my maturity, I’ve turned to a wide variety of actresses, from the obscure (Eleonore Klarwein in Peppermint Soda to the famous (such as Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping), as lures to the exploration of ideas and feelings.

 

David Thomson is to be lauded for at least attempting to explore the weird hold that stars have on us in his new book Nicole Kidman (Knopf, 284 pages, $24.95. ISBN 1.4000.4273.9). It’s not a biography of the actress so much as a book length chronological meditation on her career, its meaning, his intellectual and emotional involvement in it from afar, and his interpretation of what her roles “mean,” and about “what happens to any one beholding an actress.”

It’s new terrain, even though Thomson (author of the Biographical Dictionary of Film, and books on Welles and Selznick, among many others) has done it before, in his book on Warren Beatty. There, Thomson did much the same thing, pondering Beatty’s career and choices film by film, but he also alternated those chapters with a fictional account of a “critic” meeting up with the charismatic “actor” whom he calls Desert Eyes.

 

Personally, I like the early, fun Kidman much better, for the most part, than the late Oscar anointed super serious later Kidman. And I wonder if across the board the Australian born actress is really all that popular, lusted after or admired enough to “open” a picture such as, say, The Interpreter, the way that Julia Roberts can open something like My Best Friend’s Wedding. Kidman herself has been the subject of several quickie bios already, including Nicole Kidman: The Biography, by Lucy Ellis and Bryony Sutherland from a few years ago, and a couple since then. I have no idea how many copies these books sold, but I am guessing that they were commissioned on an assumption of popularity not born out by reality. I never hear Kidman talked about the way Roberts, or Meg Ryan, or Uma Thurman or her pal and regional colleague Naomi Watts is talked about, as idle chatter amongst film buffs and civilians. But I am still interested enough to read a whole book about her, especially one by someone with an interesting mind engaged with her on multiple levels.

 

This is a confessional book. Thomson is digging deep within himself to pull out all possible reactions, fantasies, hopes, and demands about, for, and of the star. It’s a form of mental mauling, and it’s perhaps understandable that Kidman, on September 11th, publicly announced her disapporval of the book, willfully misinterpreting it as an “unauthorized biography” written about her “after only having one brief phone chat with her,” but anyone who had read Thomson before, especially his “history,” The Whole Equation: A History Of Hollywood, in which he dedicates a chapter to her, an ab ovo version of the current book. Having seen that chapter, some editors approached Thomson to turn it into his next book, but it’s not really a book in the conventional sense, or even the literal sense. Wide margins, a large typeface, and tricks with kerning bulk out a text that is in actuality quite a quick read.

 

And I am not even sure it’s the right time for it. Thomson is just close enough to squeeze in some comments on her next film, Fur, about Diane Arbus, but Kidman has a whole raft of films coming up that could significantly alter what we think about what has come before (as all films do to all careers). She’s got a sci-fi film, The Visiting, about an alien virus, co-starring Daniel Craig and Jeremy Northam (one Bond playing against a should-been); a Noah Baumbach film opposite Jack Black; a role in New Line’s post Rings franchise, His Dark Materials, based on the Philip Pullman books; a Bourne Identity for chicks; a new Baz Luhrmann film, with Hugh Jackman, about a pre-WW II cattle drive; a Kar Wai Wong film, The Lady from Shanghai, again with Jackman; and Headhunters, a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-sounding comedy. Would Thomson’s views on Kidman be significantly different, instead of ending on the rather low point of Bewitched?

 

Probably not, because Thomson has made it clear that he doesn’t even really like movies all that much anymore. He wrote in the most recent edition of his Biographical Dictionary that he has found that he loves “books more than films,” didn’t appear to update the book fully, and for some of the newer listees didn’t even bother to comment on the young subject’s career. Nevertheless, books on movies sell more than books on books, and he continues to write about movies. Knopf publishes his books every two years or so, and he receives lavish space and, presumably money for appearing there, in Independent, the New Republic, and other publications.

Thomson’s tendency to rewrite old movies or fantasize new ones, as he does throughout his Kidman book, is perhaps a symptom of his dislike of movies rather than a sign that he still engages with the medium. The movies in his mind are better than most of the Kidman films he has to deal with. Thus he imagines kinky remakes of Rebecca and Belle du jour with Kidman in the central roles (does Thomson fantasize throwing mud on a tree-bound Kidman?), and rewrites some of her actual movies, like To Die For and Birth.

 

A book about Kidman is inevitably a book about Cruise, and here Thomson’s and my taste begin to diverge. They made three movies together, and Thomson argues that the last one ended the marriage, as a love sick Kubrick gleefully needled them by basing their characters on what he observed in their private lives. Thomson undervalues Cruise, but says some clever things about him, such as that “Cruise sounds like a young man still so anxious not to offend he would sooner not think,” on page 44.

He continues to deviate. He doesn’t praise Dead Calm enough, he ridicules the clever Malice than praises the overrated To Die For on grounds for which he just mocked Malice. He doesn’t attack the politics of The Peacemaker enough (does George Clooney look back on it with fondness?), and goes on and on about how much he dislikes Eyes Wide Shut, even putting thoughts in the head of Kubrick and imaginary grins on his face. Early on he quotes the famous Bernstein speech about the girl on the ferry from Kane but later doesn’t even connect it to the similar thoughts that Kidman’s wife has about a naval officer. He loves the bombastic Moulin Rouge, in which Kidman stuck me as terribly miscast as a sex siren, and he spends a long chapter on the atrocious Cold Mountain (it appears that Anthony Minghella has become a friend of his), where he praises the source book’s novelist for attention to detail and patient rewrites, the sort of thing for which he criticized Kubrick earlier. He likes her in the bad The Human Stain. By the end of the book he doesn’t have much beyond simple reporting to say about her recent projects such as The Interpreter or Bewitched.

 

We really only agree on admiring both Birthday Girl and Birth, as well as Dogville, a modern masterpiece, like Eyes Wide Shut. I guess he likes The Hours but I came away from that chapter not really knowing (I don’t care for the film, really).

But being thorough, or obsessed, Thomson also critiques Kidman’s stage appearances (though it is not clear if he actually saw The Blue Room), her published interviews and TV talk show appearances, and even some of her photo spreads. He waxes agonistes over the possibility of her having had face work. He even knows her shoe size (six).

He is not above score settling. He complains about a bad review of his last book in the New York Times, and then weaves a weird conspiracy theory about that paper’s treatment of Eyes Wide Shut. He takes potshots at what he lables “beaverish subtextual critics,” without explaining what they are, while sounding like one himself.

 

Thomson has taken on the weary mood of the old film buff, growing censoriousness with age, even calling for a moratorium on new films. He can still conjure up the witty insight (“While the medium is founded on fantasy involvement, still so much of its material is held up to shortsighted and depleting schemes of what is plausible,” page 203), but he is too often given over to cliches (“give up the ghost”), or worse, in order to avoid cliche, he indulges in convoluted rewrites of common phrases, such as “pressures on the mouse” for “mouse clicks” and “past their best dates for eating” for “sell-by date (page 223). He likes to list a series of qualifications and then go, “Never mind,” like Roseanne Roseanadana. Thomson engages in whole pages of throat clearing, telling us what he is not going to talk about. He changes tenses, drifting into the lofty future tense. He often has the humorlessness heaviness of John Updike, and sometimes sounds like Kael, as on page 76. Passages on pages 43 and 104 made absolutely no sense to me.

 

 

You can tell he is fed up with movies, viewers, and maybe even readers from his author photo. He stands sideways, his arms resistingly, defiantly crossed, his bearish torso covered in a black sweater. Thomson is a writer obsessed with eyes, and his own are caught in a posture of skeptical impatience with the gazer. They seem to say, “What do you want? What can you tell me? Nothing.”

 

Thomson’s book makes an interesting contrast with Lee Server‘s more straightforward biography of Ava Gardner, Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing” (St. Martin’s Press, 551 pages, $29.95, ISBN 0 312 31209 1). Thomson’s Kidman is a happy narcissist who loves the camera. Gardner was a woman with animal charisma who personally didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Once Mickey Rooney introduced her to sex, her life was changed, and she appeared in movies primarily to fund her hedonism and work in political causes. She rejected America, hated the movie business, and was kicked out of more European hotel bars than a drunken sailor on a binge.

Server, who compiled a terrific book on screenwriters as well as a previous bio on Mitchum, writes in an engaging quasi hardboiled style, and never grows tired of his subject as so many biographers do. Yet Gardner does not thrive in the posthumous pantheon, like Hepburn or Monroe. Today she’s more like an Ella Raines, the object of slavering cults among film buffs. Gardner made “important” films, such as The Barefoot Contessa and On the Beach, but a viewing of The Killers usually makes the otherwise ignorant viewer realize that Gardner was not only one of the greatest screen presences but sadly under utilized, thanks to Hollywood’s inability to showcase her and her own eventual disenchantment with the industry. Server’s book is a wonderful combination of testimonial, obit, and resume.

Kidman is an odd cinematic icon. She is sexy despite herself. There is something icy about her manner. She doesn’t exude sex, she subtracts it, especially in her later roles. Part of the reason she was miscast in  Moulin Rouge is because she does not invite sensuality. She has rarely done love scenes, and when she has, they have been acts of aggression (see  Malice). On the other hand, she is a girl who likes to dress up and play roles, while also being a cunning businesswoman, with a large streak of lovable self-doubt in her (she seems to have backed out of as many movies as she’s been in). She’s a tomboy who wants to be piss elegant. Personally, I like the tomboy, and haven’t favored the elegance. She is the opposite of Gardner, who couldn’t give a damn about her career, and would let it all go for a man. Kidman comes across as someone who holds it all in. She wouldn’t swoon. She seems like a dedicated careerist, and the role of the hustler in  Malice may in the end be the part most like her, the initiator of careful, intricate schemes of profit. I don’t mean to sound like I don’t like her, because I do, a lot. I will always go see the new Kidman film, but these days more in hopes of reclaiming the Kidman of the past.

 

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Nocturnal Admissions: Book Reviews, Nicole Kidman and Ava Gardner: “Love is Nothing”” Virginia Santiago Says: January 24th, 2009 at 1:19 pm You might get the idea how much of an Ava Gardner fan I am by my email address (hint: “The Sun Also Rises – the Hemingway film starring Ms Gardner as Brett Ashley). May I suggest for a very nostalgic read of the Golden Age of Movies and the best biography of Ms G, which I believe to be over and above the many others about her? The author is Gilles Dagneau and the title: Ava Gardner: The Rebel. This is a tribute and beautifully written literary work with absolute admiration and, yes, adoration, expressing completely how Ms G captivated those around her (including the author) and even ourselves standing on the outside. Tragically she could turn against or lose interest or become suspicious of those in her life. But,I gather, once she had your trust, the friendship would continue without end. Please read it. It’s a joy to read, and the pages are filled with photos that capture her beauty and charisma – so natural to her that it was effortless to show it. When better roles and directors she could trust finally came along, she showed her powerful acting talent. She was a very fine actress – comedy, drama, mystery, romance, musicals, – she could do it all. Unfortunately she didn’t acknowledge her talent earlier nor did she show appreciation for her talent until later. She appeared in the TV series “Knots Landing”, and her performances were also captivating. Her scenes were overwhelming and, again, powerful. I enjoy watching her scenes in this series as I believe she brought that show to life. As I read more and more about her, I am surprised to learn of her depth and daring (even as a child when she climbed up the water tower near her house but someone had to help her down – she wasn’t going to be that careless!). Oh there’s so much more I can add here but I believe you’ll have a wonderul time reading and learning more about her in Mr. Dagneau’s beautiful, charming, absolute tribute (her faults were not omitted) to a STAR: Ava Gardner – there’ll will never be another Ava! Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ