DIRECTOR
Gus Van Sant
SCREENWRITER
Buck Henry
based
on the novel by
Joyce Maynard
PRODUCER
Laura Ziskin
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Eric Alan Edwards
MUSIC
Danny Elfman
EDITOR
Curtiss Clayton
CAST
Nicole Kidman (Suzanne Stone)
Matt Dillon (Larry Maretto)
Joaquin Phoenix (Jimmy Emmett)
Casey Affleck (Russel Hines)
Illeana Douglas (Janice Maretto)
Alison Folland (Lydia Mertz)
Dan Hedaya (Joe Maretto)
Wayne Knight (Ed Grant)
Kurtwood Smith (Earl Stone)
Holland Taylor (Carol Stone)
Buck Henry (Mr. H. Finlaysson)
Joyce Maynard (Lawyer)
David Cronenberg (Man at Lake)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 106m
U.S. release: September 27, 1995
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official website
Other Gus
Van Sant films
reviewed on this website:
- Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues
- Psycho
(1998)
|
Suzanne
Stone (Nicole Kidman), the ice-hearted weatherwoman at the center
of To Die For, seems to exist entirely on the surface.
She's on TV even when she isn't on TV; she's a walking commercial
for herself. To Die For is a dark-carnival satire on the
media, a favorite punching bag of late. Suzanne represents not
only the blankness of electronic culture but the blankness of
those on both sides of the tube who consider TV the pinnacle
of human potential. To have one's image transmitted to a piece
of household furniture is to achieve nirvana. We laugh knowingly
and uneasily at the movie, and we laugh knowingly at our own
unease.
To Die For is certainly unlike anything the director,
Gus Van Sant, has done before. His first two features, Drugstore
Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, were like fever logic:
You could no more do justice to them by describing them than
you could effectively describe a pleasant but unsettling dream
-- your attempts to evoke the experience with rational waking
language become silly and reductive. ("It's about these
two male hustlers, see, and some of it is based on Shakespeare,
and .... Hey, where you goin'?") Van Sant's last film, Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues, was a travesty, a foolishly addled
fantasia only a major talent given free rein could have made.
To Die For has a crisp professional snap, as if the producer
had splashed cold water on Van Sant between takes. The script,
by Buck Henry, based on Joyce Maynard's novel, is acrid and tight
and structured like a documentary; following Henry's blueprint,
Van Sant has little room to wander. Yet the true heart of To
Die For -- what sets it apart from the other recent media-evil
movies -- is in the scenes when Van Sant softens his focus, lets
up on the dart-throwing, and stays closest to Maynard's penetrating
novel.
Suzanne kneels at the altar of Maria Shriver and all the other
glamorous priestesses of network news; she patterns her life
on theirs. She marries Larry (Matt Dillon), a harmless, amiable
lunk who runs a bar and pressures Suzanne to settle down and
have kids. Children aren't part of Suzanne's equation; neither,
really, is Larry (which raises the question of why she married
him). Larry becomes an obstacle that Suzanne must remove. Working
on a "Kids Speak Out" segment for the local cable-access
station, Suzanne prowls the small-town high school and picks
out three outcasts, two of whom she actively seduces: Jimmy (Joaquin
Phoenix), a heavy-metal stoner drowning in his own libido, and
Lydia (Alison Folland), a sad, heavy girl who sees Suzanne as
a mother, sister, and savior. Suzanne weaves an intricate web
of lies, promises, and flattery, luring the kids into her plot
to get Larry out of the way.
Joyce Maynard based her story loosely on the Pamela Smart case.
Her novel was less about the media circus or the facts of the
murder itself than about the human consequences of Suzanne's
amorality -- the ordinary, anonymous people whose lives crashed
against the sharp rocks of her ambition. Suzanne gives the kids
what they need (sex, attention) until she gets what she needs
from them. At several points, Van Sant calls a time-out to the
snickering black comedy so we can listen to Jimmy and Lydia pouring
out their disillusionment, and Phoenix and Folland reward him
with wrenching portraits of teenage wasteland -- far more evocative
and disturbing than anything in Kids.
Without them, To Die For would be a sleek cartoon version
of Network rewritten by James M. Cain.
Nicole Kidman keeps you watching; she creates an airhead who's
fun to loathe. But Van Sant's sad compassion for the kids doesn't
extend to Suzanne. Maynard didn't ask our sympathy for this blow-dried
devil, but she did suggest that there was something tragic and
chilling about someone of Suzanne's obviously tiny talent entertaining
such lavish dreams to the point of murder. (Suzanne wouldn't
have gone far, Larry or no Larry.) We saw Suzanne as a victim
of her own deluded view of the American dream. Kidman gives a
crowd-pleasing Serial
Mom performance, which would have been fine in Serial
Mom. But when she's acting with Phoenix or Folland, or, for
that matter, with Illeana Douglas and Dan Hedaya as Larry's sister
and dad -- actors who are permitted to express basic human feelings
and seem to exist in another, more naturalistic movie -- Kidman
looks so two-dimensional she's almost an abstraction of shallowness.
Even when Suzanne drops her pearly act and bares her fangs, she's
as readable as a cartoon. Van Sant is saying that Suzanne's surface
is all there is to her. But that isn't enough to sustain a satire.
And yet .... Van Sant does something new here, something he couldn't
have done without the clothesline of media satire to hang it
on. Every day, if we can stomach it, we can tune in to Ricki
or Sally Jessy and watch the freak show -- middle Americans dusting
off the skeletons in their closets and exposing them for the
cameras. The global village has become a surreal, symbiotic therapy
circle, a Moebius strip of disclosure in which we at home take
comfort in watching people infinitely more screwed up than we
are, and the guests on the shows find redemption in their fifteen
minutes of fame, blasting through suffocating anonymity as Rupert
Pupkin hungered to do in The King of Comedy. (Rupert has
become as vivid an emblem of late-20th-century insanity as Travis
Bickle.) Maynard's novel anticipated the current talk-show brouhaha
involving guests whose lives were ruined (and, in one case, snuffed
out) by their talk-show appearances.
To Die For takes the expected easy shots at Suzanne, whom
we don't buy any more than we buy Ricki or Sally Jessy when they
click into compassion mode to prompt a faltering guest. But the
odd phenomenon of starstruck gullibility -- ordinary people putting
themselves in the hands of carny barkers and snake-oil salesmen
legitimized by their televised image -- is a new subject in movies.
To Die For doesn't let us feel superior to the people
we might feel superior to if we saw them sobbing to Ricki about
the nasty weatherwoman who led them astray. For that, it gets
two cheers from me. For the full three cheers, it would have
to be brave enough to refuse to let us feel superior to Suzanne
Stone, who is as warped and as trapped by the camera eye as anyone
else in the movie. |
