“The Perfect Couple” and Nicole Kidman’s Enduring Trick

A quick confession: I’ve never seen the original. The Stepford Wives because I am so shamefully biased against the 2004 remake, in which Nicole Kidman plays both a wild redheaded TV executive and her blissfully feminine blonde doppelganger. At first, the story beats the same: After a workplace breakdown, Joanna (Kidman) and her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) seek refuge in a pastel-colored Connecticut town where — spoiler — whiny, castrated men have roboticized their career-woman wives, whom they control with remotes that look like shiny gold vibrators. They soon recruit Walter to join them, and he agrees implant a microchip. The twist in the remake is that she can’t do that. Joanna, it turns out, is a cunning tactician in the disturbing, lightless body of a sex bomb hiding in plain sight.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this. Over the past decade, since her Emmy-winning role on the HBO series Big Little LiesKidman has veered dizzily between artist and star. Last week, fresh off winning the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her daring performance in the erotic thriller Girlwas the star of a new Netflix series The perfect couple, in a performance so artificial and stylized for the first five episodes that it felt like Nicole was back at work. In the film world, Kidman seeks out writers to collaborate with: Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Lars von Trier, Yorgos Lanthimos. On television, often on shows she produces herself, she presides over what writer David Mack last week called Nicole Kidman’s Beach-Reads Cinematic Universe: a glossy, rich series about impenetrable, secretive white women who walk the line between prestige and pulp. (Opening credits for The perfect couple shows the entire cast dancing on the beach in a choreographed sequence to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals.”)

Read: The Secret Big Little Lies

In her latest television role, Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a popular crime novelist and the absurdly mannered matriarch of a privileged Nantucket family. The series is adapted from the novel of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand, who at one point describes Greer as conveying “class, elegance, even regality.” In character, Kidman does seem like a constructed vision of femininity: teased yellow hair, a stiffly slender figure, a controlled voice, a gaze that is ambiguous and detached. She is more than a little alien, unnaturally poised and unattainable. Susanne Bier, the Danish filmmaker who directed The perfect coupleis known for tight close-ups, and with some cast members, she zooms in to show us details of their eyebrows, noses, pores. But with Kidman, she often films the actor behind glass, as if to respect her distance — her reluctance to let the audience get too close. I felt the intention behind it, but that didn’t mean he worked; there are moments when Greer reminds me of Kristen Wiig as Katharine Hepburn in Saturday Night Live. (“We Love “You,” he mutters to the videographer, about his son and his fiancée. “We LOVE You.”)

In the final episode, however, Kidman does one of her signature somersaults, revealing part of what she’s been playing all along. The episode left me wondering if I’d done her a disservice by assuming she saw her roles as binary: “serious” work with visionary directors versus adaptations of airport novels for women. There’s a connecting thread in her work that probably deserves more attention. Kidman has covered nearly every sticky trope in the industry’s playbook over her decades in Hollywood. She’s been the damsel in distress (Dead silence, By a lot), fatal woman (Moulin Rouge, Human stain), unknowable naivety (Birthday girl, Dog City), witch (Practical Magic, Bewitched). In both of the last Netflix movies Family matter—amazing romance with Zac Efron —and in the upcoming Girlshe plays an older woman drawn into a sexual relationship with a younger man. In most of these roles, she leans into the cliché, only to subvert it. Her performances interrogate what visual storytelling suggests about women, allowing her to embody a certain kind of artifice before shattering it before our eyes.

Spot Kidman’s bait-and-switch once, and you’ll start seeing it everywhere. It helps that as an actress, she hides more than she shows, favoring fragments of insight over full-blown reflection. In 1993, Malicesly neo-noir, Kidman plays Tracy, a demure newlywed and kindergarten teacher who is tormented by a diabolical doctor (Alec Baldwin) — until we learn that Tracy is much more involved in the events than she seems. The film only works because Kidman can play in such different registers: the muted, wide-eyed bride and her exciting, hysterical other. Her performances confirm, time and again, that we have no idea what her characters — and by extension, the actress herself — are capable of. Nadia, the Russian catalog bride in Jez Butterworth’s 2001 film Birthday girldisturbingly shifts between many characters: seducer, charlatan, object of desire.

What do women want Nicole Kidman? More than they get. In the second half of the ’90s, Kidman played a disjointed variety of roles that were nonetheless characterized by a similar state of intense desire. In Gus Van Sant’s dark satire from 1995, Kill forshe played an aspiring TV reporter whose ambition pricked her skin like a chewy candy. In Jane Campion’s 1996 film Portrait of a Ladywas Isabel Archer, Henry James’s determined naiveté, duped by scheming dilettantes. Three years later, she starred alongside her then-husband, Tom Cruise, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes wide shutplaying a married woman whose confessions of erotic dreams about other men torment her husband. The performances were all very different, but each character embodied the same acute frustration at being trapped by the expectations of others. It was an era in Hollywood, as the film critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2003, in which actresses were expected to be lovers, adept at projecting “a certain warmth that was both sexual and sympathetic.” But warmth was never Kidman’s natural mode. She fascinates without ingratiating herself.

IN The perfect coupleAs the mother of a son who marries a woman Greer sees as an intruder, she’s as laid-back and tense as a corpse, gliding from room to room in neutral silks and occasionally giving off flashes of genuine menace. Everyone else in the show is happily goofing off at this — Dakota Fanning exploits elitist levels of (spoiled) brattyness as another daughter-in-law, Eve Hewson models the bewildered accessibility of an ordinary woman as the bride — and amidst this liveliness, Kidman’s performance feels distinctly out of place. Greer works at a breakneck pace, churning out new books every year to help fund her sybaritic family’s lifestyle. In return, at family events, she enforces the deranged protocol of a minor British royal. (“Amelia, didn’t I give you a family robe wear?” she demands of the bride-to-be; later, watching Amelia nibble on a croissant, she mutters, “The wedding dress, to hell, eh?” Fixing a steady, slightly bulging gaze on anyone who crosses her path, Greer is a sublime diva. But Kidman doesn’t seem to be having fun with the role so much as trying to find its dark center. She clearly takes it all quite seriously.

Perhaps it’s because Greer’s edgy ennui has been a part of many of Kidman’s recent roles—of inconsolable, wounded women facing a world that writes them off, unkindly, as depressed mothers of wine. Kidman had made the art of playing vaguely suffering women her own even before the 2017 HBO series. Big Little Liesin which her character, Celeste, gradually comes to grips with the idea that her sexually exciting marriage may also be abusive. The actress has long been drawn, terrifyingly, to characters who have lost children, from Dead silence until 2010 Rabbit Hole (her first credit as a producer under her company Blossom Films) for the recent Lulu Wang series for Amazon Expats. She often takes on and undermines the role of mother. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2017 horror film Killing of the sacred deerplays a woman who at one point claims that her own life is worth more than the lives of her children. In 2022. Northern ManPlaying Queen Gudrún, she displays incredible, monstrous sexual power, only to – in another diabolical twist – entangle her own son.

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The space where sex and power intersect is a minefield for female performers, and it’s territory Kidman has long considered her own. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Girl comes exactly a quarter of a century later Eyes wide shutor that Kidman still presents herself as a sexual figure in her late 50s. For the first decades of her career, passive sexuality was widely expected of female stars—a bargain you made if you wanted to stay at the top of the payroll. Instead of accepting those terms, Kidman weaponized her sexuality. In 1998, when she was one half of the most powerful couple in the industry and still negotiating her status in Hollywood beyond, she starred in a West End production of David Hare’s Blue roomplaying five separate roles in a performance that one critic described as “pure theatrical Viagra.” In 2001, Moulin Rougein fact, her divorce film, her courtesan, Satine, was sexual dynamite in whalebone and feathers. Kidman knows what visual storytelling wants from women, but she’ll only offer it as part of her own agenda.

Being a sex symbol, as an actor, is a trap, and Kidman has always been able to avoid it. Perhaps that’s why the show is so The perfect coupleproduced doesn’t seem so far removed from the more prestigious work on her resume. Greer—augmented, hyper-calm, dressed to death—is an unnatural extension of how women are supposed to look in public. The obvious artifice is the point. When Kidman tears down the curtain in the final episode to reveal who she really is, Greer becomes part of the actor’s line of woman-killers: unexpected, unsettling characters who demand to be seenthey don’t care what we think of them and will never compromise.