Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Even though Tom was the star—and Nicholson became an important character only toward the end of the movie—it was the older man who had the best lines. At one point, he says: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns . . . You don’t want the truth because, deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

  In many ways, A Few Good Men was Tom’s biggest challenge to date. Not just because he had to play opposite a movie legend, but because he had to memorize so many legal phrases and complicated dialogue, not an easy task for someone with reading problems. Co-star Kevin Bacon, who played Captain Jack Ross, the prosecutor assigned to convict the two Marines, also had problems with his lines. Sometimes, during make-up, the two men rehearsed each other.

  An additional challenge for Tom was that the movie provided him with no opportunity to flash his heralded charm in the face of the opposite sex. His scenes with Demi Moore were business-like, devoid of romance and sex appeal (indeed it later was suggested the role was originally meant for a male, but was changed to a female without making gender changes in the script). The closest the two characters come to romance is a debate over when an invitation by Galloway for dinner constituted an official date. Galloway said definitely not. Kaffee said it sounded like a date to him. And so it went.

  Although there was no romance in the movie, there was plenty on the set whenever Nicole showed up to visit Tom. Typically, they found a dark corner and kissed, while embarrassed crew members tried not to watch. She may not have enjoyed playing the role of the girlfriend in the movies, but she demonstrated a real talent for it in real life.

  For the most part, film critics were enthusiastic about A Few Good Men. Peter Travers, writing in Rolling Stone, described Tom as a “fireball” and Nicholson as a “marvel . . . coiled to spring.” Then he adds, “There is no bigger kick in movies right now than watching Nicholson pull out all the stops as he takes on Cruise. Maybe it isn’t art. Sometimes witty, suspenseful, knockout entertainment is enough.”

  Rita Kempley, writing in the Washington Post, described the movie as a “brass-buttoned, square-jawed huzzah for military justice that’s thankfully free of the messy moralizing of the Vietnam age . . . it’s a grand undertaking that wrangles with the heavy questions that cropped up at Nuremberg and My Lai, questions that deserve and get lots of imposing shots of monuments and not a little swashbuckling from the big stars.”

  One notable dissenter was Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Nicholson is always fun to watch, as he barks and snarls and improvises new obscenities. Cruise is an effective contrast, as the immature young officer who discovers himself . . . But the movie doesn’t quite make it, because it never convinces us that the drama is happening while we watch it; it’s like the defense team sneaked an advance look at the script.”

  For all the grand visions seen in the film by some critics, the ticket-buying public flocked to theaters (it grossed $237 million worldwide) not to see a discourse on the abuse of military power, but to see Tom and Nicholson, representing Hollywood’s young gun and old guard, clash in face-to-face combat, however symbolic it might be. The most memorable confrontation between the two men, the one that made all the television sound bites, occurred when Kaffee pressed Jessup on the witness stand.

  “You want answers?” asks Jessup

  “I think I’m entitled.”

  “You want answers?”

  “I want the truth!” says Kaffee.

  “You can’t handle the truth!” snarls Jessup.

  The financial success of A Few Good Men proved the box-office drawing power of stars such as Tom Cruise, Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, and Kiefer Sutherland, but it raised new questions in Tom’s mind about the direction his career should take. He was the star of A Few Good Men, but it was Nicholson who got the best lines. When movie-goers left the theater, they did not mimic him saying, “I want the truth”—no, they mimicked Nicholson’s, “You can’t handle the truth!”

  What Tom wanted more than anything else was a role he could really sink his teeth into—and, for whatever reasons, that continued to elude him. In 1992, no one in Hollywood was any bigger than Tom Cruise—he was a box-office leader, earning in excess of $10 million per film—but he felt that despite his enormous success, he should be doing better things with his talents.

  ~ ~ ~

  In January 1992, Parade magazine reported that Nicole and Tom were expecting a baby in February. “Not true!” countered a spokeswoman for Nicole. She demanded—and received—a retraction by the magazine. Anyone with half a brain could see that Nicole was not eight months pregnant.

  Actually, there was some truth to the story. The couple, in fact, was expecting a baby—an adopted child—and somehow word had leaked out and the story had gotten twisted in the telling and the re-telling. Horrified by the story, Nicole and Tom put their secret adoption plans on hold.

  For months, the tabloids had been filled with speculation about whether they could have children of their own. Some stories suggested that the couple had been tested and had learned that Tom was sterile. Others suggested that it was Nicole who was unable to conceive. The couple was outraged by the Parade story, which they felt was an invasion of their privacy, because it spotlighted their so-called marital “inadequacies” and made it difficult for them to pursue adoption.

  Heartbroken by the experience, Nicole put her emotions aside and began work on her next movie project, one that would not feature her husband. Malice is a thriller that was carved from the same psychological putty as Dead Calm. Directed by Harold Becker (Sea of Love and The Onion Field), it featured a strong cast made up of Alec Baldwin, George C. Scott, Bill Pullman, Anne Bancroft, and Bebe Neuwirth.

  Nicole was asked to play Bill Pullman’s wife, Tracy—yes, she did accept another “girlfriend” role, but this one has a wicked twist and hardly counts—opposite both Bill Pullman, who plays her husband Andy, and Baldwin, who plays a hot-shot surgeon named Jed Hill. The supporting cast included Bancroft as Tracy’s mother and newcomer Gwyneth Paltrow as a student/murder victim. It was only Paltrow’s third feature film and she would be hardly noticeable in the film today had she not gone on to better things.

  Malice begins with a pastoral look at a women’s college as classes are let out and the students pour out onto the campus. With an uplifting chorus in the background, a student rides her bicycle home, where she is raped and badly beaten as she feeds her cat. She is rushed to the hospital, where Dr. Jed Hill saves her life with aggressive sleight-of-hand in the operating room.

  When Andy, a dean at the college, shows up at the hospital to inquire about the student, he meets Dr. Hill and realizes that they attended the same high school. He offers to rent Dr. Hill a room on the third floor of the house he shares with Tracy—a school teacher— until he can find a home of his own.

  Tracy voices disapproval over her husband’s decision to rent the room because she says it gives them little privacy (he says they need the money), but she seems unconcerned about a young boy in the house next door who sits at the window and watches them have sex.

  When Tracy experiences mysterious stomach pains and is taken to the hospital for emergency surgery, it is Dr. Hill who performs the operation. He removes both her ovaries and it later turns out that the second ovary did not have to be removed. Since that means that Tracy will no longer be able to have children, she gets a lawyer and sues Dr. Hill. She ends up winning a huge settlement from the hospital.

  Angry with her husband, whom she also blames for the unnecessary surgery, she goes home to visit her mother. Although Tracy is the focus of the story, it is slow to develop and her best lines occur late in the movie, when her role in the plot is understood.

  One of Nicole’s best scenes is with Pullman. After she finds a hypodermic needle in the bed, obviously placed there to injure her, she sets up a meeting with Andy and confronts him with her suspicions. “Sweetie,
I’m going to talk for a minute, so it’d be better if you didn’t interrupt me, okay?” she says, her voice sweetly menacing. “I found a hypodermic needle in my bed. I don’t know who put it there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t think it was funny . . . So what I’m saying is this—whoever played that joke is playing in a league they’re not ready for. Now I came here hoping we can reach an understanding.”

  Later, fearing that Andy has learned their secret, Dr. Hill tells Tracy to pay him off. She brushes that suggestion aside and suggests that they commit a murder.

  “Do you know what you’re saying?” he asks.

  “What’s the big leap, Jed? You cut me open, stuck your hands in and twisted my ovaries so they’d look all dead . . .”

  Dr. Hill slaps her hard across the face. She responds by pulling a pistol on him.

  Clearly, by the end of the movie Tracy is not the woman that began the movie. It is her dark secret that propels the plot and gives the movie a surprise ending.

  Nicole did a great job of acting in the film, showing anger that never got away from her. It is difficult for an actor to show anger, while keeping his or her eyes reflective—and Nicole was able to do that with apparent ease. A lessor actress would have tried to show the anger in her eyes as well as in her face, thus destroying the psychological validity of the character’s true mental state.

  When the movie was released, critics were generally unkind. Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers felt it was too over the top. “Perhaps director Harold Becker thought flashy acting could distract us from the gaping plot holes. Becker gets so intent on confusing us, he forgets to give us characters to care about, the way he did in Sea of Love . . . Malice is way out of that classy league. It’s got suspense but no staying power.”

  For Jeff Shannon, writing in the Seattle Times, there were problems with the way the plot ended, but Nicole’s acting impressed him: “Kidman is a femme fatale for the ‘90s, giving a deliciously nasty performance. She can’t prevent you from forming early suspicions (and neither can Baldwin, whose cocky charisma is used as a smoke screen), but there’s just enough doubt to keep things interesting.”

  The most biting and irreverent comment about the movie came from Roger Ebert, who wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Peering into the shadows of Malice, I was reminded of a remark at this year’s Telluride Film Festival by John Alton, the ninety-two-year-old cinematographer who specialized in using shadows and darkness. ‘If I’d used more lights,’ he said, ‘they would have been comedies.’”

  Making the film—it was shot in Massachusetts—had been pleasant enough, though there were reports that Tom displayed a little jealousy when he showed up on the set during a love scene between Nicole and Baldwin. “Some of those kissing scenes are a little too strong—and a little too long,” Tom said, according to the Star. “A kiss shouldn’t take a minute and a half—ten seconds is more like it.” Baldwin reportedly snapped back with, “Sorry, but Kim [Bassinger] is away for five days.”

  ~ ~ ~

  After shelving their adoption plans for almost a year, long enough they thought, to allow public interest to wane, they revived those plans in early December 1992 and filed for adoption in Palm Beach, Florida.

  Again, word leaked out. This time their lawyer demanded an investigation into what he called a “blatant breach of confidentiality” and he asked for the dismissal of all court personnel who were involved in leaking the information.

  Frustrated by their inability to pursue a private legal procedure that thousands of Americans each year successfully enter into and complete, with a minimum amount of stress, Nicole and Tom withdrew their adoption petition. Their lawyer said they feared that if they continued with the adoption, the birth mother’s identity would be discovered and that would have unfortunate repercussions for everyone involved.

  Why was their lawyer so willing to make public comments about the fiasco? It was a smoke screen so that Nicole and Tom could secretly pursue adoption from another angle. Within weeks, they located another child and filed a new petition. This time, the procedure went much more smoothly.

  In January 1993, they went to a Miami hospital and picked up a healthy, baby girl that they named Isabella Jane Kidman Cruise. The daughter of a married woman who already had two children, Isabella weighed in at nine pounds. The name Isabella has no family connection; they chose it simply because they liked it.

  To Nicole and Tom’s surprise, the National Enquirer published photos of the couple cuddling the infant wrapped in a blanket. There were reports that Tom made a deal with the photographer, exchanging the hospital photo for the photographer’s promise to lay off them in the future, but that seemed ridiculous since the photo made it more likely that the mother, who did not know the identity of the adopting parents, would be able to recognize her child and cause trouble for the couple at a later date.

  Within weeks of arriving home with Isabella, Nicole started work on her next movie project. Written and directed by Bruce Joel Rubin, who scored a major hit in 1990 with the box-office hit Ghost, My Life is the story of a terminally ill man who prepares for his death by videotaping interviews with himself and others about his life.

  It was only Rubin’s second time to direct a film, the first occurring twenty-three years earlier with Dionysus. Perhaps because he once spent a year and a half exploring India and Tibet, living for a while in a Nepalese monastery, he had a metaphysical view of life, one that he injected into My Life, some would say to the film’s determent.

  Although there are more than a dozen supporting characters in the film, it is basically a two-person show—Bob Jones, the dying public relations executive, played by Michael Keaton, and his wife, Gail Jones, played by Nicole Kidman. It is true that it was another “girlfriend’ role for Nicole, but she did not bristle at this one for two reasons—first, because Gail is not a sex object (the movie is oddly asexual), and second because she was allowed to straighten her hair, in her mind a symbol on her few maturity.

  My Life begins with one of Bob Jones’s childhood experience in which he prays for a circus to appear in his back yard and then becomes disillusioned with God because it does not happen. The scene is a setup for the true beginning of the film, thirty years later, when Bob, presumably once again let down by God because of his terminal illness, is shown making a video for his unborn child.

  Nicole’s first appearance occurs when Bob and Gail are in bed. They do not make love; they talk about his illness. Gail says, “You know at some point we’re going to have to tell people.”

  “Don’t forget to tell me when that is, okay?” he says.

  “Amazing isn’t it? There’s just no appropriate etiquette for his.”

  He jokes about it and then has a severe pain attack.

  Early in the film, it is apparent Nicole has been told by the director to be subdued and to whisper her lines to emphasize the gravity of the situation. It is a technique that fails, especially since Keaton seems determined to mumble his way though the entire film. Much of what he says is so low and jumbled that it is beyond the capacity of the human ear to detect.

  When his doctor tells him there is nothing else he can do, that he has only about three or four months left, he leaves the doctor’s office devastated. Then, as he’s walking away, he realizes that attitude is not acceptable. He storms back into the doctor’s office and tells him, “Don’t take away my hope—it’s all I’ve got left.”

  Gail suggests he try a Chinese practitioner because she knows other people who have been helped by alternative medicine techniques. Bob is reluctant, but he does it to please her, figuring it is the least he can do under the circumstances.

  One day the Chinese practitioner tells him: “The last second of your life is the most important moment of all. It’s everything you are, ever said, ever thought, all rolled into one. That is the seed of your next life . . . until that last moment, you still have time.”

  Inspired by his conversations with the practitioner, Bob tak
es his video camera on the road and gets in touch with the people of his past, ostensibly to leave a record for his child, but just as importantly to try to understand why his life turned out the way it did.

  One day Gail finds one of his tapes and watches it, not knowing that it is one in which he tells his unborn child not to be upset if his mother marries again. It hits Gail hard, as could be expected. “I feel like I’ve already lost you,” she tells him. “Like we’ve lost each other.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Don’t say anything. Just hear me. Bob, I need you . . . I can’t do this alone. I need you to be there.”

  Much of the film deals with Bob’s inability to relate to Gail about what he is feeling about his eminent demise and what she is going through with the pregnancy. When she tells him that she wants him to go with her to get an ultrasound—they don’t yet know the sex of the baby—he frowns, reluctant to do it.

  “I need to share this with you, Bob,” says Gail. “Don’t make me go through it alone, please. It’s our baby. Don’t pretend it away.”

  He responds that he’s not—that he’s setting up a trust fund and preparing for “its” future, to which Gail responds, “Bob, please—love us!”

  In many ways, Bob is the cancer patient from hell. He wants to embrace life, at least whatever life he has left, but the anger and frustration that he feels sets up a defense that keeps others away. Because he is estranged from his family—he hasn’t visited them in four years—Gail encourages him to re-establish contact with them. She tells him his brother is getting married in April.

  “You’re kidding,” he says. “To whom?”