Cinematical

After hearing one too many people go on about how bizarre film critic David Thomson's new unauthorized biography of Nicole Kidman is, I decided to blow through it. Turns out the book is hardly a biography at all, but something so oddly, intrusively personal and fetishistic that it seems like a translation of some French film theorist's meditation on screen beauty. Thomson mostly sticks to one source -- himself. He makes no effort to hide being in love with Kidman, and devotes paragraph after paragraph to describing her face, bone structure, legs, and "long white thighs," which are "the hands on life's clock, whirling onward." The book contains little information that wasn't already public, except when it comes to Kidman's sex scenes, which are chronicled to a degree that it's hard to imagine where the unsourced information was obtained. Thomson claims, for instance, that Eyes Wide Shut contained sex scenes that were shot but left out, including a "detailed" cunnilingus scene for which Kidman wore a pubic wig. He also explicitly reminds us (and you can imagine him licking his lips as he does so) that Kidman was paid for doing such dirty things.

The book is mostly chaptered by recent film titles, with the bulk of Kidman's early work left undiscussed; don't pick it up if you're expecting insight into the making of Watch the Shadows Dance or Days of Thunder. The recent films that make the grade, in Thomson's opinion, are Moulin Rouge, The Hours and to some extent, Dogville, while some like The Others come in for sharp derision. In each case, Thomson's internal monologue is poured out onto the page, and his recollections of each film, invariably focused on Kidman's body, get tangled up with the impressions of his more detached critical eye. Endless pages are devoted to deconstructing Kidman's look in Birth, for example. His fixation on that particular film is so bottomless that he invents alternate scenes and storylines that could have improved the film, including one in which we see Kidman menstruating in a bathroom and noticing her menstrual blood "as if it were something new, dramatic, but guilt-making."

As readable as these passages are, they are peanuts compared to the extended epilogue, which follows a snooty dismissal of The Interpreter. Thomson has a dream he wants to recount for us. Lying in bed with his wife one night, she, knowing him all too well, teases him with the obvious question -- "Are you dreaming about her yet?" "Sometimes," he confesses. He then launches into the dream, in which he is an "elderly gentleman" walking down a Parisian side street with a black cane, tapping the pavement as he walks. The door to a discreet apartment opens before him. He steps inside and is greeted by the middle-aged madam of a brothel. There's a menu of choices, and it includes a seven-foot Zulu woman "with a natural predisposition to violence" and a wicked Japanese girl. Thomson is not impressed. He's on the verge of leaving, when the woman finally offers up the brothel's star. He is led to a private room. Inside is Nicole Kidman, in white panties and a white bra, "a size or two too small," in the middle of a sex sandwich between "a Gestapo officer and an elderly Chinaman."

Thomson's film acumen and ability at turning a phrase lift the book way over the hump of simply being masturbatory. This tome isn't meant to be carried out in a brown paper bag. What we have here is actually something quite unique, at least on my bookshelf -- a male film critic's autobiographical fantasy file. It's the unvarnished truth on the deeply felt connection between his desires as a flesh-and-blood man and what his trained critical sensibilities can appreciate. He pronounces himself ready to contend with it all. The book is crafted explicitly for "fellow sufferers" who spend most of their waking hours fantasizing about a night with, or even life with, their precious "Nicole-whoever," which is how Thomson labels the collective psychological, psycho-sexual portrait of the lady he has wrestled into submission in these pages. In the final chapter of the book, titled "Dangerous Age," he bemoans the cruel fate awaiting Kidman in 2007, when she will turn the awful, career-killing age of 40. He knows the party will soon be over, but he keeps hope alive by reminding us that the prolific actress has lined up a slate of films to carry her "over the threshold," before the dream dies.