Nicole Kidman’s 5 Bravest Roles

“Birth” (2004)
“Hey, let’s go see that movie where Nicole Kidman takes a bath with then kisses a 10 year-old boy who she thinks is the reincarnation of her dead husband!” was what pretty much nobody said back in October 2004, ensuring Jonathan Glazer’s uncategorizable, flawed but eerily beautiful “Birth” went gently into the good night of box office obscurity. But while maybe a hard sell for even the most adept of arthouse marketers back then, it’s a film that has gradually grown in retrospective acclaim, contrary to some poisonous reviews at the time, and when people do go back and rediscover it, one of the things that can’t be denied is the shimmering loveliness of Kidman’s performance. Yes, the film plays to her patrician, statuesque beauty, but the tenderness she brings to her role, the edge of a grief so old it seems almost physically painful to have it flare back up into hope, is a special sort of lightning in a bottle: a thousand things go on behind her eyes, and yet she retains, as the film’s tone requires, a sliver of unknowability. And for the majority of the running time, she and her director again seem in perfect sync, with Glazer weaving the film around her, as she betrays with only tiny moments, the oceanic feelings inside. The underplaying is vital in a film that has potential to become silly or salacious but actually retains a tone of uneasy intrigue throughout. Well, almost throughout — the great misfortune is that the film’s ending undoes a great deal of the compelling and uniquely-voiced work up to that point, both over- and under-explaining a plot which till then operated more on the level of fairytale than real-world what-if. But even as it’s crumbling around her, Kidman retains her focus, and her grasp on her character and our attention.

Narrowly missing out on a spot in this list were Kidman’s turns in Noah Baumbach’s “Margot at the Wedding” in which she throws herself into a deeply unsympathetic role (but we did feature it in Essentials, in addition the downbeat but minutely observed “Rabbit Hole” and “To Die For“), and “Fur” which despite an intriguingly offbeat premise ends up just too slight to count among her more daring choices. “Moulin Rouge!“which was of course a challenge from the point of view of the singing is otherwise less about performance than costuming, choreography and design, but she’s also terrific in a gruelling early TV miniseries “Bangkok Hilton” that came about before her Hollywood breakout. And there could have been any of several more — Kidman, even in genre fare, has matured into an actress who can almost always be relied upon to commit to a project and a director completely — an act that requires a certain courage every single time. Before the end of the year we’ll be seeing her possibly cameo in “Anchorman 2” and after that channel Grace Kelly  in “Grace of Monaco.” In the meantime, we’re aware how subjective an assessment of a role’s risk value can be, so feel free to tell us in the comments why our list should actually have included “Trespass,” “Australia” and “Practical Magic” instead.