Movie Review: Destroyer

Destroyer **** / *****

Directed by: Karyn Kusama.

Written by: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.

Starring: Nicole Kidman (Erin Bell), Toby Kebbell (Silas), Tatiana Maslany (Petra), Sebastian Stan (Chris), Scoot McNairy (Ethan), Bradley Whitford (DiFranco), Toby Huss (Gil Lawson), James Jordan (Toby), Beau Knapp (Jay), Jade Pettyjohn (Shelby), Shamier Anderson (Antonio), Zach Villa (Arturo).

 

A couple of years ago, Guy Lodge ran a large Twitter poll, with multiple rounds, trying to determine what the crowd thought was Nicole Kidman’s best performance. It hardly matters what won (I think it was Birth – which would probably be the correct choice) – but going through all those performances, you realize just how great an actress Kidman is – and has been – for her entire career. How much of a risk taker she has been, how many great directors she has worked with, and how she seems willing to go just about anywhere, or do just about anything. For some reason, she isn’t spoken about in the same reverent tone that is reserved for actresses like Cate Blanchett – but she should be. They are equally great actresses.

 

You can now add her performance in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer to the list of Kidman’s great performances. It is a performance that deliberately grabs you from the first frames with just how Kidman looks – one of the most beautiful women in the world has been layered with makeup to make her a rundown, beat-up, grimy version of herself. She almost looks like one of George A. Romero’s zombies – and in the opening scene – where her detective walks onto a crime scene – she moves like one as well – shambling slowly, methodically, with a dead look in her eyes. She is, in a way, already dead – her body just doesn’t know it yet.

 

As a movie, Destroyer, unfolds slowly through two interconnected timelines. 17 years ago, Kidman’s Erin Bell was a young cop, teamed up with a FBI Agent Chris (Sebastian Stan) to go undercover and infiltrate a dangerous gang of drug using bank robbers. All we really know at the start is that something there went horribly wrong – and Chris doesn’t make an appearance in the modern scenes, so we can guess he was a part of that – and that the ringleader, Silas (Toby Kebbell) seems to have reappeared after all this time, and is settling scores – hence the body with the distinctive neck tattoo in that opening scene, and the dye-pack stained $100 bill someone has sent Erin in the mail to the police station. As hard living, veteran cops are want to do in movies like Destroyer, Erin goes rogue and tries to single handed bring in Silas. In order to do that, she needs to get back into contact with each and every member of the gang from all those years ago. You would think some of them would have fled L.A. in the last 17 years, but they haven’t, and they all seem to be haunted by what happened, just like Erin. Each and every interaction Erin has with these people in her past both brings her closer to Silas – but also costs her, physically and emotionally – as she is often attacked and/or degraded. But still she presses on.

 

The film was directed by Karyn Kusama, who really does direct the hell out of the movie, and makes the most of Kidman’s performance. The movie feels like a statement of some kind – although I’m not exactly sure of what. Perhaps it’s just to show that a woman can play the type of role that would normally be given to a man – Kidman is more hard living and frazzled than anyone True Detective could come up with. Perhaps its to point out the difference in the way we view men and women – you could easily see a hard drinking, older, frazzled male detective as sexy still (it doesn’t have to be a detective – look at Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born) – but you wouldn’t describe Kidman that way, and why is that? In the flashback scenes, Kusama and Kidman don’t shy away from the latter’s sex appeal (Kidman can do things with her eyes, as she does here, that is more erotic than most actresses can do with their entire bodies).

 

The movie certainly doesn’t view Erin as any kind of hero. It makes it clear from the beginning that she blames herself for what happened all those years ago – and eventually we’ll find out why she is (mostly) right in assigning herself the blame. She has clearly been a horrible mother to her 16-year-old daughter (remember how long ago I said the flashbacks were), Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) - who is headed down her own dangerous path. Erin may be the least bad person we meet throughout most of Destroyer – but that doesn’t mean she isn’t bad.

 

The screenplay for Destroyer probably isn’t as good as either Kusama’s direction or Kidman’s performance. As a director, Kusama continues to get better, and here she kind of locks us into Erin’s perspective, and keeps us there. We’re either staring into eyes, or else seeing things as she sees them – even if that doesn’t give us the whole picture. The screenplay, with its time jumps, deliberately withholding information, and would be twist ending doesn’t quite live up to what Kusama and Kidman are doing – but it does give them both an opportunity to delve into the darkness, and find something, if not exactly original, at least unique.