Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (12 page)

“Do you know what you’re saying?” he asks.

“What’s the big leap, Jed? You cut me open, stuck your hands in and twisted my ovaries so they’d look all dead . . .”

Dr. Hill slaps her hard across the face. She responds by pulling a pistol on him.

Clearly, by the end of the movie Tracy is not the woman that began the movie. It is her dark secret that propels the plot and gives the movie a surprise ending.

Nicole did a great job of acting in the film, showing anger that never got away from her. It is difficult for an actor to show anger, while keeping his or her eyes reflective—and Nicole was able to do that with apparent ease. A lessor actress would have tried to show the anger in her eyes as well as in her face, thus destroying the psychological validity of the character’s true mental state.

When the movie was released, critics were generally unkind. Writing for
Rolling Stone
, Peter Travers felt it was too over the top. “Perhaps director Harold Becker thought flashy acting could distract us from the gaping plot holes. Becker gets so intent on confusing us, he forgets to give us characters to care about, the way he did in
Sea of Love
. .  .
Malice
is way out of that classy league. It’s got suspense but no staying power.”

For Jeff Shannon, writing in the
Seattle Times
, there were problems with the way the plot ended, but Nicole’s acting impressed him: “Kidman is a femme fatale for the ‘90s, giving a deliciously nasty performance. She can’t prevent you from forming early suspicions (and neither can Baldwin, whose cocky charisma is used as a smoke screen), but there’s just enough doubt to keep things interesting.”

The most biting and irreverent comment about the movie came from Roger Ebert, who wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
: “Peering into the shadows of
Malice
, I was reminded of a remark at this year’s Telluride Film Festival by John Alton, the ninety-two-year-old cinematographer who specialized in using shadows and darkness. ‘If I’d used more lights,’ he said, ‘they would have been comedies.’”

Making the film—it was shot in Massachusetts—had been pleasant enough, though there were reports that Tom displayed a little jealousy when he showed up on the set during a love scene between Nicole and Baldwin. “Some of those kissing scenes are a little too strong—and a little too long,” Tom said, according to the
Star.
“A kiss shouldn’t take a minute and a half—ten seconds is more like it.” Baldwin reportedly snapped back with, “Sorry, but Kim [Bassinger] is away for five days.”

~ ~ ~
       

After shelving their adoption plans for almost a year, long enough they thought, to allow public interest to wane, they revived those plans in early December 1992 and filed for adoption in Palm Beach, Florida.

Again, word leaked out. This time their lawyer demanded an investigation into what he called a “blatant breach of confidentiality” and he asked for the dismissal of all court personnel who were involved in leaking the information.

Frustrated by their inability to pursue a private legal procedure that thousands of Americans each year successfully enter into and complete, with a minimum amount of stress, Nicole and Tom withdrew their adoption petition. Their lawyer said they feared that if they continued with the adoption, the birth mother’s identity would be discovered and that would have unfortunate repercussions for everyone involved.

Why was their lawyer so willing to make public comments about the fiasco? It was a smoke screen so that Nicole and Tom could secretly pursue adoption from another angle. Within weeks, they located another child and filed a new petition. This time, the procedure went much more smoothly.

In January 1993, they went to a Miami hospital and picked up a healthy, baby girl that they named Isabella Jane Kidman Cruise. The daughter of a married woman who already had two children, Isabella weighed in at nine pounds. The name Isabella has no family connection; they chose it simply because they liked it.

To Nicole and Tom’s surprise, the
National Enquirer
published photos of the couple cuddling the infant wrapped in a blanket. There were reports that Tom made a deal with the photographer, exchanging the hospital photo for the photographer’s promise to lay off them in the future, but that seemed ridiculous since the photo made it more likely that the mother, who did not know the identity of the adopting parents, would be able to recognize her child and cause trouble for the couple at a later date.

Within weeks of arriving home with Isabella, Nicole started work on her next movie project. Written and directed by Bruce Joel Rubin, who scored a major hit in 1990 with the box-office hit
Ghost
,
My Life
is the story of a terminally ill man who prepares for his death by videotaping interviews with himself and others about his life.

It was only Rubin’s second time to direct a film, the first occurring twenty-three years earlier with
Dionysus.
Perhaps because he once spent a year and a half exploring India and Tibet, living for a while in a Nepalese monastery, he had a metaphysical view of life, one that he injected into
My Life
, some would say to the film’s determent.

Although there are more than a dozen supporting characters in the film, it is basically a two-person show—Bob Jones, the dying public relations executive, played by Michael Keaton, and his wife, Gail Jones, played by Nicole Kidman. It is true that it was another “girlfriend’ role for Nicole, but she did not bristle at this one for two reasons—first, because Gail is not a sex object (the movie is oddly asexual), and second because she was allowed to straighten her hair, in her mind a symbol on her few maturity.

My Life
begins with one of Bob Jones’s childhood experience in which he prays for a circus to appear in his back yard and then becomes disillusioned with God because it does not happen.  The scene is a setup for the true beginning of the film, thirty years later, when Bob, presumably once again let down by God because of his terminal illness, is shown making a video for his unborn child.  

Nicole’s first appearance occurs when Bob and Gail are in bed. They do not make love; they talk about his illness. Gail says, “You know at some point we’re going to have to tell people.”

“Don’t forget to tell me when that is, okay?” he says.

“Amazing isn’t it? There’s just no appropriate etiquette for his.”

He jokes about it and then has a severe pain attack.

Early in the film, it is apparent Nicole has been told by the director to be subdued and to whisper her lines to emphasize the gravity of the situation. It is a technique that fails, especially since Keaton seems determined to mumble his way though the entire film. Much of what he says is so low and jumbled that it is beyond the capacity of the human ear to detect.

  When his doctor tells him there is nothing else he can do, that he has only about three or four months left, he leaves the doctor’s office devastated. Then, as he’s walking away, he realizes that attitude is not acceptable. He storms back into the doctor’s office and tells him, “Don’t take away my hope—it’s all I’ve got left.”

Gail suggests he try a Chinese practitioner because she knows other people who have been helped by alternative medicine techniques. Bob is reluctant, but he does it to please her, figuring it is the least he can do under the circumstances.

One day the Chinese practitioner tells him: “The last second of your life is the most important moment of all. It’s everything you are, ever said, ever thought, all rolled into one. That is the seed of your next life .  .  . until that last moment, you still have time.”

Inspired by his conversations with the practitioner, Bob takes his video camera on the road and gets in touch with the people of his past, ostensibly to leave a record for his child, but just as importantly to try to understand why his life turned out the way it did.

One day Gail finds one of his tapes and watches it, not knowing that it is one in which he tells his unborn child not to be upset if his mother marries again. It hits Gail hard, as could be expected. “I feel like I’ve already lost you,” she tells him. “Like we’ve lost each other.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Don’t say anything. Just hear me. Bob, I need you . .  . I can’t do this alone. I need you to be there.”

Much of the film deals with Bob’s inability to relate to Gail about what he is feeling about his eminent demise and what she is going through with the pregnancy. When she tells him that she wants him to go with her to get an ultrasound—they don’t yet know the sex of the baby—he frowns, reluctant to do it.

“I need to share this with you, Bob,” says Gail. “Don’t make me go through it alone, please. It’s our baby. Don’t pretend it away.”

He responds that he’s not—that he’s setting up a trust fund and preparing for “its” future, to which Gail responds, “Bob, please—love us!”

In many ways, Bob is the cancer patient from hell. He wants to embrace life, at least whatever life he has left, but the anger and frustration that he feels sets up a defense that keeps others away. Because he is estranged from his family—he hasn’t visited them in four years—Gail encourages him to re-establish contact with them. She tells him his brother is getting married in April.

“You’re kidding,” he says. “To whom?”

He voices surprise that they were even invited to the wedding. Forget it—I’ll probably be dead by then anyway.”

“Great—then you’ll have the perfect excuse for not showing up.”

Nicole has a few great lines in the film, but her character is so underdeveloped that her performance often seems flat and uninspired. She has appeared in very few films in which she did not develop a strong on-screen chemistry with the leading man. For whatever reason—her marriage to Tom could have been a factor—she and Keaton never connected. That combined with direction to recite their lines in a near whisper proved fatal for the film’s artistic vision.

When
My Life
was released, reviews were mixed.
Chicago Sun-Times
critic Roger Ebert thought parts of the movie were good, but he did not like the way the humor and seriousness of the story were contrived into juxtaposition. “[It] should be a more rigorous and single-minded film,” he wrote. “Maybe it started that way, before getting spoonfuls of honey to make the medicine go down. If a character invites us to join him on the most important journey of his life—to parenthood and death—then he shouldn’t distract us with little side trips to schtick and funny business.”

A
Rolling Stone
reviewer could not wait to twist the knife in the corpse: “There’s potential in a movie about a professional deceiver who gets slammed with some scummy facts about who he is by trying to sell an idealized version of himself to his child. Keaton could have played the hell out of that role. But Rubin swallows Bob’s PR campaign and then asks us to swallow it, too. No sale.”

By all accounts, Nicole was upset over the reviews, not just the negative ones, but even the positive ones that made her realize how limited her character had been in the film. Always insecure about her physical appearance, she concluded that she was not leading lady material. All a leading lady had to do was simply project the right image—at least that was the prevailing wisdom of the day in Tinseltown. Nicole did not see that quality in herself. Her true talent, she decided, was as a character actress, someone who projected different images for different roles.

Nicole had tried to be a “star” opposite Tom in
Days of Thunder
and
Far and Away
–and she had tried it with Alec Baldwin in
Malice
and Michael Keaton in
My Life
—and the results had all been the same .  .  . a big zero. How could she have fallen so far since the intoxicating victory of
Dead Calm?
  Convinced that her film career in America was going nowhere, she thought about returning to Australia. If she had not been happily married to Tom, she surely would have done so.

Unable to flee to Australia and unwilling to stumble into more dead-end roles, where she was expected to shine as a “movie star,” she decided to rethink her career. “I took time off and evaluated why I was an actor, and why I was here, and what I wanted to do,” she told the
Boston Globe.
“I didn’t realize when I made
Far and Away
how much I would then be defined and judged in relation to [Tom].”