Product: To Die For (1995)
Rating: 5.0
Empathy for the Evil Queen
I want to qualify this next statement by saying I have not seen his version of "Psycho". With that aside I would like to say that "To Die For" is Gus Van Sant's best film to date ("Drugstore Cowboy" is his second best). The Buck Henry screenplay is what makes it so good.Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is genuinely evil, there is no doubt about it. She is the personification of unbridled ambition, willing to do anything to gain her desired goal. But she is more than just the villain of the movie, she's is the primary sympathetic character. That's the ambiguity that makes this a "good" black comedy. She has a predatory mammalian intelligence that makes her dangerous, but she is also naive and just plain none-too-bright at times (though the movie doesn't abound in overly intelligent characters). And, I have to admit, Nicole Kidman has never looked so good to me, though attractive in a kitschy-kitten sort of way (I'm heterosexual, but I tired quickly of her repetitious nude screen in "Eyes Wide Shut") .The sad depths of how far she was willing to go to achieve her ambition is best shown by the scene directly after her job interview at the little local cable station. In this scene she pulls a letter-sized envelope out of her purse, rips it up and throws it in a garbage can out front. We don't know what's in the letter -- no letter was shown to us earlier -- but we can assume it contained an explicit promise for sexual favors along the lines of a letter she heard about, a little earlier in the film, in a story told by a journalist (George Segal) -- a letter that had helped some unidentified, though supposedly famous, news woman land one of her first important jobs.Suzanne's husband (Matt Dillon) decides, after a year of marriage, that she has had her fun playing the weather girl down at the cable station, but she must now give that up so she could be with him at his' and his father's restaurant. Even though this is the event that precipitates his demise -- her preeminent evil act -- we, the audience, can feel how robbed she feels. At no point in the movie is she more a metaphor for the misunderstood artist, thwarted by the small-mindedness of others. She sits stunned and submissive in her chair as he tells her what her life is going to be like from then on, attempting to separate her from the dream that has defined her for as long as she can remember. It is assumed, throughout the movie, that Suzanne does everything out of selfish motives, but here we see he has been equally false, marrying her without really believing in her aspiration to be a news woman, supporting her in her dream for only a short time, then pulling it away when she feels she might be getting somewhere . . . though she had duped herself, as usual, about how well her career was actually going.Suzanne Stone is the evil one in the movie, but none of the other characters are all that good. In many ways she is the "scapegoat" that redeems them. All the exploitative press about her crime spawns celebrity status for the cable station manager (Wayne Knight), a prestige he seems to enjoy, though he had always made light of her ambition for fame. Her sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) -- who desires to be a skater (from her first scene she appears to be not particularly good at it), and is also depicted as competing with Suzanne for the spotlight -- describes Suzanne as being "cold". Yet the very last shot of the movie shows Douglas's character skating on the lake where we -- and we expect she too knows -- her evil sister-in-law is buried beneath the ice. I wouldn't say such an act -- to dance on one's grave, so to speak -- is especially "warmhearted".