Review: Nicole Kidman is fearless in 'Babygirl'
Leave the kids home for this erotic spellbinder starring Nicole Kidman like you've never seen her before as a lady boss, inching toward 60, who abuses her position and risks career suicide for a fling with a 20-ish intern, played by hottie Harris Dickinson ("Triangle of Sadness").
Is it love? Hardly. "Babygirl," now on sizzle mode in theaters, isn't about age differences. When you look like Kidman and Dickinson, no one is counting birthdays. Gorgeous trumps appropriate every time. Except neither party is strictly in it for the sex. Control is the turn on.
Let me explain. Kidman plays Romy Mathis, the demanding CEO of a Manhattan robotics company who longs to be subservient. This married mother of two teen daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly) later tells her theater director husband Jacob (a magnetic Antonio Banderas) of her desire to be dominated, but he's not into role-playing.
As luck would have it, intern Samuel (Dickinson) definitely is. He quickly intuits (I won't say how) what Romy needs.
"You want to be told what to do," Samuel says with a teasing smile.
He starts small by ordering her to drink milk instead of coffee, then demands she get on her knees. Like a puppy, Romy is rewarded with a cookie and called "babygirl" when she complies.
Instead of shame, Romy revels in releasing her repressed sexuality by expressing her needs, however unorthodox, to Samuel. He's into it. "I make the rules by breaking yours," he tells office mentor Romy with an insolent, unearned confidence she can't resist. Dickinson is mesmerizing.
He and Kidman radiate a carnal vibe that singes the screen. But writer-director Halina Reijn ("Bodies Bodies Bodies") goes way deeper than a riff on "Fifty Shades of Grey" without the whips and chains. Reijn, a former actress, joins forces with Kidman to get at the root causes of why a woman at the top like Romy would risk everything to lose control.
Reijn shows how carefully Romy sets herself up as an image of perfection, even getting Botox treatments.
"Why do you do that to yourself?" one of her daughters asks. "You look weird, like a dead fish."
Yet Romy persists in erecting a cosmetic barrier against perceived flaws.
It's Samuel who demands the real thing. His sudden intrusions into her family life scare Romy and excite Romy. "It needs to be dangerous," Romy says at one point. "Something has to be at stake."
Samuel is not adverse to issuing a threat: "I could make one phone call and you'd lose everything," he tells his boss. He's not wrong.
Tension escalates when Romy's assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) tells her boss she knows what's going on with her and Samuel. Is it a conspiracy, a way for both Esme and Samuel, who are dating, much to Romy's horror, to advance on their career tracks?
I'll hold off on spoilers except to say that Romy takes herself to the brink of professional and personal disaster before the smoke clears and she can finally see a way ahead. And that way is self discovery. In tandem with Kidman's fearless performance -- she took the best actress prize in Venice -- Reijn strips Romy of all her defenses, and her reaction is a sight to see.
Kidman's daring is now the stuff of legend, and she charges "Babygirl" like a sparking livewire, releasing the movie from dated notions of female sexuality into the this-just-in possibilities that come with hardcore honesty.
"Babygirl" is never as transgressive as it pretends. Its clinical gaze can freeze out feeling. But Kidman and Reijn are both refreshingly unjudgmental about this female powerhouse who is turned on by behavior even she thinks is appalling. Our last look at Romy shows a woman on top of a world of her own making. Prepare to be wowed.
