Post by WizLemon on Jan 8, 2019 2:02:40 GMT
Beautiful read:
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/destroyer-movie-karyn-kusama.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The Filmmaker Karyn Kusama Explores the Many Dimensions of Women’s Rage
From ‘Girlfight’ to ‘Destroyer,’ her movies are distinguished by her willingness not to revel in brutality but to look it in the face.
If you were standing on tiptoes outside the theater door while your mother sat transfixed by “Destroyer,” what you’d see through the porthole window is Nicole Kidman’s face, looking like a red carpet that has been trampled. She’s haggard and worn, with eyes so sharp and wounded that they seem to look through you and into the shame of your own past. You’d see her body, loping like an old coyote across a dirty sunlit freeway, and you’d see her stagger and vomit and grimace while she grabs a soap dish and bashes in the head of a bodyguard and then, like some sort of furious arachnid with an uncountable number of legs, pistol whips a crooked lawyer till his eye bleeds. You’d see her cock a semiautomatic weapon like a veteran, and maybe you’d hear her tell her daughter’s scuzzy boyfriend how easy it would be to kill him, because, as she says with terrifying evenness, “I don’t care what happens to me.” All this would unfold at a human pace that might, if you’re used to high-octane, explosion-a-minute action movies, feel slow and, in a perfectly restrained, matter-of-fact way, as intense and compressed as a hematoma.
Kusama had intended to cast a younger actress in the film, which would have made straddling the story’s two temporalities easier, but she could not pass up the opportunity to work with Kidman. She appreciated that in addition to all her other gifts, Kidman brought to the role what a younger actress could never bring: “life maturity.” “Destroyer” is very much a document of time and the burden of experience. Like “Girlfight” and “Jennifer’s Body,” it explores how women internalize their trauma by externalizing it physically. Kidman suffers. She’s punched and kicked and bruised. She’s constantly hung over. She is sun-damaged, wrinkled, grimacing, exhausted and unkempt. But she is also powerful — and looks beautiful. There is a nakedness to her face, as if now that she is unrecognizably unglamorous, we can finally see what she looks like. She speaks in a low, hoarse voice (the flu helped her find that register), and she squints into the sun, because “Destroyer” is an L.A. noir that takes place mostly in daylight.
From ‘Girlfight’ to ‘Destroyer,’ her movies are distinguished by her willingness not to revel in brutality but to look it in the face.
If you were standing on tiptoes outside the theater door while your mother sat transfixed by “Destroyer,” what you’d see through the porthole window is Nicole Kidman’s face, looking like a red carpet that has been trampled. She’s haggard and worn, with eyes so sharp and wounded that they seem to look through you and into the shame of your own past. You’d see her body, loping like an old coyote across a dirty sunlit freeway, and you’d see her stagger and vomit and grimace while she grabs a soap dish and bashes in the head of a bodyguard and then, like some sort of furious arachnid with an uncountable number of legs, pistol whips a crooked lawyer till his eye bleeds. You’d see her cock a semiautomatic weapon like a veteran, and maybe you’d hear her tell her daughter’s scuzzy boyfriend how easy it would be to kill him, because, as she says with terrifying evenness, “I don’t care what happens to me.” All this would unfold at a human pace that might, if you’re used to high-octane, explosion-a-minute action movies, feel slow and, in a perfectly restrained, matter-of-fact way, as intense and compressed as a hematoma.
Kusama had intended to cast a younger actress in the film, which would have made straddling the story’s two temporalities easier, but she could not pass up the opportunity to work with Kidman. She appreciated that in addition to all her other gifts, Kidman brought to the role what a younger actress could never bring: “life maturity.” “Destroyer” is very much a document of time and the burden of experience. Like “Girlfight” and “Jennifer’s Body,” it explores how women internalize their trauma by externalizing it physically. Kidman suffers. She’s punched and kicked and bruised. She’s constantly hung over. She is sun-damaged, wrinkled, grimacing, exhausted and unkempt. But she is also powerful — and looks beautiful. There is a nakedness to her face, as if now that she is unrecognizably unglamorous, we can finally see what she looks like. She speaks in a low, hoarse voice (the flu helped her find that register), and she squints into the sun, because “Destroyer” is an L.A. noir that takes place mostly in daylight.
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/destroyer-movie-karyn-kusama.html?partner=rss&emc=rss