|Penny Folger|
To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, released in 1995, showcases a bristlingly ambitious woman named Suzanne Stone, played by Nicole Kidman, who will stop at nothing to be a television journalist—mowing down anything that stands in her way, including loved ones. Although for Suzanne, “television journalist” is loosely defined. Van Sant says Stone, “models herself after someone like Barbara Walters,” and explains, “It’s mostly the image that she’s after, and not the follow through.”1
Yet there’s something in Suzanne’s countenance and single-minded pursuit of this goal that makes her feel less than human. She’s as if someone built an anchorwoman robot, trained to kill anyone who might try to dissuade her from her singular purpose. This image is reinforced in a scene where her hapless husband tries to foolishly steer her off course (after being misguidedly coached by his sister to stand up to her.) As Van Sant points out, “Taking his sister’s advice and saying no to his wife sort of put her into a tailspin.”2 The camera takes on Suzanne’s point of view, becoming an iris with her husband in the center, surrounded by blackness. It simultaneously conveys the disassociation she feels and makes him visually into a target. She’s like a wild animal silently zeroing in on her prey.
As a character, Suzanne is exaggerated and darkly comedic. The script was adapted by Buck Henry, of The Graduate fame, and the entire film is satirically dark in tone. It was based on the novel by Joyce Maynard who was inspired by the court case of Pamela Smart, the woman convicted of being an accomplice in the murder of her husband by her underaged boyfriend and three of his friends.
Suzanne is a lipglossed sociopath as psychotic cartoon character, though Kidman’s rendering of her was anchored enough to win her a Golden Globe. While Suzanne’s certainly tenacious, she’s not bright, especially in her deduction that her husband is any real threat to her goals. As Van Sant explains, “We wanted people to see that the reason she was at odds with him and he was in the way, was really her own kind of logic that was the problem, and not Larry himself. He’d probably even support her wanting to kill him.”3 Larry’s family’s rumored mob ties render him much more of a threat to her bumped off, than alive and well. The real-life speculation that Smart was having her husband killed off to collect on his life insurance makes for a more sound motive.
Kidman was not the studio’s choice. “No one thought I could do it and I think the studio didn’t want me, and it sort of went through a bunch of other actors,”4 she explained years later. She fought hard for the role, with the kind of persistence and intensity that Suzanne exemplifies. Said Van Sant later, “Via phone, she shoved me up against the wall and she said, ‘Look, I’m destined to play this part.’”5
After winning the part, Kidman hired an acting coach for months and kept a book of notes and exercises on the set the size of a telephone book that was like a Bible for her character. This obsessive thoroughness was just like Suzanne. Noted the film’s editor, Curtiss Clayton, “The power of that character is just like a steamroller.”6
At a local cable station where Suzanne applies, she goes on the job interview with the intensity of someone trying to win a primetime anchoring spot at CNN. It’s a total mismatch for the environment. Reflects the station manager, “I figured I’d be interviewing a couple of high school dropouts who wouldn’t mind going over to the mall and picking up donuts and emptying the ashtrays.” After she leaves, they refer to her, chuckling, as “gangbusters!”
Yet film critic Jessica Kiang, writing for Criterion, speaks to the vulnerability of Suzanne: “Watch To Die For again and the surprise is that Kidman is also kind of heartbreaking. There are cracks in the glaze—a flub, a flash of panic, a glimmer of glue on false eyelashes—through which we see the vulnerability beneath the lacquered-on layers of ambition and delusion.”7
Suzanne is an extreme cinematic character but also takes on more pathos when you realize what she’s rebelling against, in her own exaggerated homicidal way. It’s the traditional track where a woman plays second fiddle to her husband, child-rearing, and the family business: subverting her personal desires or ambitions by moving passively down a life path that has been pre-planned for her: one in which she has no interest. This doesn’t give her license to kill, but you can see the dead end of a future that her husband presents to her. (At least a dead end for someone with dreams of her own, however exaggerated they may be.) It becomes like a comic symbol of the women’s movement that the only way she can move forward is to “off” her husband.
The movie plays her as an ambition-crazed ice queen to humorous effect, but what are the implications of such a character? Were these really the only two choices for the women of thirty years ago: playing an unsatisfying supporting role in one’s own life or becoming an ambition-crazed monster? It’s a dichotomy that’s a bit… limited.
Joyce Maynard, the author of the novel upon which the screenplay was based, subverted her own life at the age of 19, quitting her summer job at The New York Times and dropping out of Yale. All to move in with her love interest: famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger, 34 years her senior, who was living in seclusion in New Hampshire. It upended her own life just as it was starting up. Speaks Maynard plainly about the relationship in 2021, “I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life.”8 And so perhaps Suzanne is an exaggerated symbol—a physical manifestation— of the guilt many women may have felt in a certain era about sticking to their guns and carving out their own paths against societal pressures and norms. Turning against the wishes of family members and the general culture at large, in an era where the dreams of women were not as integrated or normalized, you might be painted as a monster, or feel like one yourself.
Even Kidman, known prior to this more as “Mrs. Tom Cruise” than a powerhouse in her own right, took the path of least resistance before she won this role. (The majority of her high-profile roles prior to this moment were opposite him.) She speaks about her own waning ambition when embarking upon her marriage to Cruise. “I’m always driven by love, so I can be taken way off my course.”9 She worked much less as a result, eventually becoming antsy and longing for the acting opportunities she’d had as a teen in Australia.
Is the monster at the center of this movie, played so exquisitely by Kidman, really the phantom ambition of these women unrealized at different points in their lives, now run amok? Oddly when Kidman reclaimed her own ambition she took on the characteristics of Suzanne to achieve her own ends.
A portion of the film’s narrative is told documentary-style, in first-person interviews after events have occurred. According to Illeana Douglas, who plays Larry’s ice skating sister Janice, Citizen Kane was a big influence on Van Sant and his editor. Smart’s own story was a big sensationalistic news story in its day, pre-O.J., at a time when such things were just starting to dominate the media landscape. O.J. Simpson’s Bronco chase ironically interrupted filming on To Die For, as the crew gathered around a television set.
Joaquin Phoenix, who had taken several years off from being a child actor, made his return to the big screen in To Die For around the age of 20. He is exquisitely blank-eyed, and groundedly naturalistic in his slowness in the role of the wayward teenager Suzanne seduces. The trio of teenagers Suzanne meets while making a documentary for her station entitled, “Teens Speak Out,” and later befriends and manipulates is comedically, realistically dull. The sadness of Lydia, the girl of the trio, played by Alison Folland in her first film role, as she cries to Suzanne much later in the narrative, “I thought we were frieeeeends!” would feel as tragic if it did not seem to be played by the filmmakers more for comedic effect. Hapless and dimwitted, the teens topple over like pawns in service to Suzanne’s wishes. Joaquin’s character Jimmy stutters sobbing to police later, “It wasn’t like that. We were in love.” He has no awareness that he was putty in Suzanne’s hands, and that her sights were set only on achieving her own goals. Despite the sardonic tone of this movie, there’s a sadness behind the genuine emotions of some of its characters, helped along by the sublime performance of future Oscar winner Joaquin. People are as they are in this movie, in all their ugliness, and no one is ultimately made happy in the end.
Smart herself, who believes she’d still be married to her late husband if the murder had never happened, never pursued a career as a TV journalist. “Somehow in that story I got changed into a weather girl,” she quips. She is critical of the film and more specifically of the larger media’s influence on people’s perceptions of her. “People watch these things and then they say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that case.’ And they’re really remembering the movie.”10
There’s a passage in the novel where Suzanne speculates about who will play her in the movie version of her life: “Some people say they’re sure to make a movie about this. If so, I’d like to see Julia Roberts play me. Or that actress that just got married to Tom Cruise in real life—I can’t think of her name.”11
References:
- Gus Van Sant, interview by Bobbie Wygant, Bobbie Wygant Archive, 1995. ↩︎
- Gus Van Sant, interview by Bobbie Wygant, Bobbie Wygant Archive, 1995. ↩︎
- Gus Van Sant, interview by Bobbie Wygant, Bobbie Wygant Archive, 1995. ↩︎
- Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, Season 5, Episode 1, 2017. ↩︎
- To Die For, commentary by director Gus Van Sant. ↩︎
- To Die For, commentary by editor Curtiss Clayton. ↩︎
- Jessica Kiang, “To Die For: You’re Not Anybody in America Unless You’re on TV,” Criterion essay, March 26, 2024. ↩︎
- Joyce Maynard, “‘Predator Men With a Taste for Teenagers’ Joyce Maynard on the Chilling Parallels Between Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger,” Vanity Fair, April 11, 2021. ↩︎
- Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, Season 5, Episode 1, 2017. ↩︎
- Pamela Smart: The Missing Pieces. ↩︎
- Maynard, Joyce. To Die For. A Dutton Book, 1992. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum