o
pain, no gain," the athletes say. And indeed, Moulin Rouge -
the stylized musical that marks the biggest left turn in Nicole Kidman's
career - left a great deal of physical and emotional pain in its wake.The singing and dancing epic from Australian director Baz Luhrmann uses Can-Can-era Paris as a metaphor for everything from Studio 54 to grunge-era slackers. And its extreme physicality left Kidman with plenty to wince about, starting with the first few weeks of filming when the combination of a tight corset and hundreds of "onstage" lifts by "chorus boys" left her with broken ribs.
"I had never broken a rib before, so that was a bit of a shock," she told Entertainment Tonight. She filmed through that, only to tear knee ligaments because of strenuous dance moves, and had to spend a month during production in bed. "I was an idiot," she told Australia's Talk magazine. "I ripped all the cartilage behind my knee by dancing on it for two weeks after an injury because we had to finish the film. I'm Catholic, but I have this Protestant work ethic where I cannot say no."
This latter injury would change the course of casting history, when she showed up in December unable to walk for her next assignment, David Fincher's thriller The Panic Room (about a mother who hides in a secret room with her child when her house is the target of a home invasion). When it became clear she couldn't do the job, she quit the film and flew home to recuperate. In the meantime, the role of the terrorized mother was handed over to Jodie Foster.
Which is when Kidman's husband, Tom Cruise - I bet you wondered
when that name was going to come up - told her he wanted a separation. How
much he wanted a separation became clear after he moved out, when he filed
for divorce (with a claim, cynics would note, that the marriage
effectively ended in December, just before the 10-year mark, when
California law would characterize it as a "longterm union").Obviously much has been written about the most shocking Hollywood breakup since, well, Meg and Dennis. But the official word from Cruise's publicist, that it sprang from the difficulties of two globe-trotting careers, was at least backed up by an infamous transcript of a two-year-old Tom and Nicole phone argument, which suddenly found itself all over the Internet. (The original invasion of privacy earned a British tab reporter a six month jail sentence after the couple pressed charges). In that spat, at least, absence was the topic and the heart was not growing fonder.
They haven't exactly sat down for any soul-baring interviews since
the breakup, but in recent prior interviews, Kidman did allude to
difficulties. "It's hard," she told Talk. "It's
tough being a woman and having kids and working. Something is going to
give. I only work now if I really feel it's worth it. You could try to do
it all and try to take all the roles you want but you wouldn't know your
kids and you wouldn't have your marriage. Distance destroys relationships.
It just does. Even if you have a really strong love it can be destroyed
over time. You start looking in different directions. You just do, you
can't help it."It's hard to say what was "worth it" in retrospect. But Moulin Rouge was shot in the bosom of Kidman's native Australia, where her children Connor and Isabella go to school, where her family lives and where lifelong friends from both in and outside of the acting community form her support group.
Loosely based on the Greek tale of Orpheus - the mortal poet who travels to the Underworld to rescue his doomed love from Hades, only to lose her again - Moulin Rouge is, in its simplest terms, about a turn-of-the-century-poet named Christian (Ewan McGregor) who becomes a songwriter for the famed Moulin Rouge, the Studio 54 of 1890s Paris. There he makes the acquaintance of such notables as Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) and falls in love with singer-dancer and courtesan, Satine (Kidman).
"The Moulin Rouge we've created is not the Moulin Rouge of
1899. It's the Moulin Rouge of our last 10 years," Luhrmann says. (In
fact, the movie was first imagined as being set in the aforementioned
disco mecca Studio 54). "It's very well-researched. But it's like
going to the wildest techno club. It's a bohemian underworld that really
isn't hell but is where disconnected spirits live."If it sounds like he's struggling for a metaphor, he's not the first. Others have pegged Moulin Rouge as "Rocky Horror meets Titanic" and "The Wizard of Oz meets Apocalypse Now." "You may be killed in the rush as they run for the exits," Luhrmann says with cheerful fatalism.
It's par for the course for Kidman to be along for the ride on a film that stands to be a classic or a disaster in equal measure. After all, it's only a few years since she spent 18 months of her life with her soon-to-be ex-husband on Stanley Kubrick's last film - the almost-incomprehensible and still argued-about Eyes Wide Shut. So she knows risks when she sees them. She was in the middle of another risk-taking experience, the Broadway play The Blue Room (with its famous nude scenes) when Luhrmann "discovered" her. By way of wooing her, he sent her flowers with the note "She sings. She dances. She dies."
"This is a pretty brave film for Baz to be making," Kidman said about Moulin Rouge. "You kind of go, 'God, I hope it works because I would hate to see him have to go through hardship in terms of being creatively attacked.' Because it will spoil something in him that's so needed. There's something pure and naive about him that makes you want to say, 'Go on! Go and do it!' The naiveté is so beautiful
And then, of course, there's that element of pain. "It's almost like Baz takes you to the side of the cliff and just pushes you off," she says. "You just say, 'I hope that there's water down there.' "
- Jim Slotek
| filmography
The Hours (2001) |
