The movie is as much a mystery about the dirt underneath Erin’s fingernails as the case she doggedly pursues, which is gleaned when she commandeers the investigation of other LAPD detectives regarding a dead body that’s washed up in the county while adorned with purple paint-stained dollar bills. Even so, it imbues its film with a grizzled despair that can elevate the more boilerplate passages of the film. As the type of visual transformation that likely will get noticed by Academy Award voters, it is also probably too grim a personage to receive recognition beyond nomination. It takes almost the whole running time of the two-hour movie to understand why she has decided to crawl into a bottle, but when the film begins, her complete resignation to such dominion is unquestioned and played with a raw sort of mingling of pride and shame by the actor. In short, she is the perfect lead for noir, breaking the generic binary prism women are usually placed in with these sorts of films while standing as her own captivating creation-even if that stance ends with her sliding under the table.Īll grayed and bloodshot makeup, plus a yellowing lather on her teeth, Kidman’s Erin Bell is a fantastically unkempt and disheveled creation. Indeed, Karyn Kusama’s sunbaked neo nightmare gets a lot out of Nicole Kidman’s stellar performance as a poor, haunted cop doing an even poorer job of becoming the hero. But sometimes that aesthetic can be mostly the province of the actor-king, or in the case of Destroyer, actor-queen. In a world of paranoia and despair, aesthetic reigns supreme. While my college professor would quibble over even labeling it a “genre,” it is easy to see his point. Dennis Hopper once said that noir is every director’s favorite genre.
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