Destroyer

A lot of people asked me after the screening why I’m always playing violent characters. I said I’ve never, ever played a violent character. I have played characters who were in deep conflict and despair and chaos.

-Harvey Keitel

The female rage in DESTROYER is reminiscent of Keitel’s performance in BAD LIEUTENANT. Here we see that same meta analysis from a woman’s perspective, driven by Nicole Kidman’s undercover detective Erin Bell.   Directed by Karyn Kusama, the film appears to be a conventional Heist Gone Wrong but unfolds into a deeper story about a woman determined to steer her daughter toward a better life than her own.

17 years earlier, she and another undercover cop, Chris (Sebastian Stan, in a minor but devastating role), infiltrated a group planning an armed robbery led by Silas (Toby Kebbell)—at once referencing various genre films including Mann’s HEAT and Bigelow’s POINT BREAK.  Silas is that sort of greasy-haired, bestubbled gangster with a Cheshire grin and a penchant for loyalty tests.

The broader outline of the story borrows some Hollywood tropes—Latin criminals, wrung-out single parent cops on the take, rebellious children.  But the film, among the first distributed directly by Annapurna in a deal struck earlier this year at Cannes, quickly departs conventions.

Complicating Bell’s plan to extricate her daughter, Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), from her corrosive surroundings in Los Angeles is a boyfriend far too old.  Hollywood films would tie it up in the third act with a cheap revenge scene—completely gratifying and absolutely unrealistic.

Kusama veers away from these temptations frequently, only adding to a tension build-up that culminates in the most harrowing bank job since the opening sequence of THE DARK KNIGHT.  She also crafts more nuanced storytelling to enrich audiences with the woman’s perspective without ever leaning on expository dialogue.  Look closely at Bell’s ex-husband Ethan’s (Scoot McNairy) bearded face.  Even in casting, Kusama subliminally informs the viewer that Bell, albeit unsuccessfully, sought out a surrogate for Shelby’s biological father.

Musing on Charlize Theron’s casting as Aileeen Wuornos in MONSTER, part of me wonders why these roles fall to lithe and beautiful women and not any number of SAG members who could perform such roles equally well. On the other, the fact that the dorky looking redhead from BMX BANDITS and WINDRIDER has had to pluck, tuck and stair-master herself into Nicole Kidman to land promising roles is itself the very commentary I’m trying to make.  If either Theron or Kidman half-assed it, we’d be well within rights to call them out.  Such is not the case.

The film falls a little short of greatness for standing on a scaffolding erected by writers and directors past, but Kidman, Kusama, cast and crew, elevate it well beyond pablum.  Despite its shallow set up (working backward from the dead body near the ravine), DESTROYER picks up quickly.  The picture finds its focus deconstructing the crumbling relationships Bell has with everyone around her—coworkers, informants, family.  Bell’s journey comes full circle and a half, ending not at the cliché crime scene, but at the crossing of the road less traveled she’d left behind 17 years earlier.