Film
To Die For
- Director
- Gus Van Sant
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 107 mins
Over the opening credits, lurid tabloid headlines tell the story which is about to unfold in flashback from the viewpoints of a variety of participants. Attractive young Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is married to ordinary, decent Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) but obsessed with celebrity and determined to become a TV star. At the local two-bit cable station, she sets out to make a film about The Kids on the Street, which brings her into contact with transcendently inarticulate, dick-fixated pothead loser Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), whom she seduces and persuades to get rid of boring old Larry.
There’s about as much depth to Gus Van Sant’s sly 1995 swipe at celebrity as their was to John Waters’ take on the serial killer industry in Serial Mom, whose tone To Die For echoes more closely than such celebrated TV satires as Network. What it does have is a painfully funny script. Phoenix is excellent as the hormone-driven stoner dude from Little Hope, wearing the stupid grin of one who cannot believe his luck, even after he’s arrested and carted off to the slammer. But the film belongs to Kidman, who turns in a career-best performance as the amoral, ruthlessly ambitious yet wholly vacant Suzanne, who is at once frighteningly plausible and strangely familiar. It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s timely Manipulating the Message season as part of this year’s Cinema Rediscovered.
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