By Michelle Orange on 12/04/2009, IFC.COM
If time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist -- the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices -- eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an Oscar win and the embrace, finally, of her peers on her own terms.
However, as the '00s limp to a close, Kidman seems to be succumbing to a personal vendetta against time: by manipulating her face into a mask -- a waxworks ideal of "Nicole Kidman" -- rather than continuing to deploy it as a functional instrument, an artist's tool, Kidman is taking perhaps the most surprising risk of her career: she has chosen to age into glacial iconicity. In this, she exemplifies a decade that treated actresses with ambivalence, waving all the flags of empowerment and agency at the post-Julia Roberts cohort, who wanted to have it all without having to play the charming prostitute, only to corral them into the same old pens: ingénue, mother, old maid.
Kidman, of course, showed signs of life during her pre-Naughts career, most notably in her 1989 breakthrough "Dead Calm," and again in "To Die For" in 1995 and "The Portrait of a Lady" in 1996. Maligned as often for her mannered, on-screen frigidity as she was dismissed for her off-screen attachment to Herr Cruise, audiences gave her her due, particularly for her turn in the Van Sant film, a blackly comic media farce, but it was grudging, as though the director had tapped into a neat utility for Kidman's innate chill and deserved most of the credit.
The Naughts: The Actress of the '00s
