Film: David Thomson, hitherto the most distinguished film writer of his generation, has, in recent years, offered his many admirers repeated cause for concern. Indeed, some of us feel that the time has come for Thomson's friends and family to mount that revelatory social ambush addiction specialists refer to as an intervention.
The author of the peerless Biographical Dictionary of Film has not, you understand, taken to snorting cocaine or staking his kids' college fund on the gee-gees. He has, rather, developed a quite undignified dependence upon Nicole Kidman.
Thomson's 2004 book, The Whole Equation, an eccentric history of Hollywood, featured an uncomfortable series of encomiums to the etiolated Australian's purported talent and supposed beauty. Since then, the author has taken every opportunity to salivate over Kidman in his otherwise excellent column in the Independent on Sunday.
With this in mind, the reader, fearful of contamination from lingering bodily effusions, may be tempted to don surgical gloves before lifting Thomson's profoundly peculiar biography of the Oscar-winning actress.
Sure enough, Thomson barely gives himself time to clear his throat before launching into damp ruminations on Kidman's much-photographed contours.
Her "sexy come-hither look" appears as early as page six. In the same paragraph, after considering the many nude images of Kidman available on the internet, Thomson suggests that: "You may know the curve of her bottom as well as you know your child's brow". (Speak for yourself, mate.) Later we are asked to ponder the "mystery of her sexiness", her "very lovely body" and her "hide and seek eyes".
Kidman's eyes seem to have a particularly deleterious effect on Thomson's writing. While discussing the actress's performance as a murderously ambitious weather woman in 1995's To Die For, the besotted biographer goes so far as to suggest those organs might be wide enough to accommodate ocular fellatio - though that is not the term he uses.
It gets grimmer. From time to time Thomson moves beyond mere ogling to embark upon the sort of prose you might expect to encounter scrawled in gravy (or worse) on the walls of a lunatic asylum. Consider his ruminations upon the Kidman complexion:
"It is the quality of flesh you find in Ireland still, and in religious paintings of the Renaissance, and it is a mysterious fusion of the spiritual and the erotic," he writes. "It leaves you realising that Nicole has or has had the equipment to play a saint." Nurse, the screens!
What makes the lubricious asides so annoying is that they abut significant passages which, when dabbed clean of drool, stand comparison with Thomson's most incisive writings. His treatment of Kidman's early career in Australia, her success in the thriller, Dead Calm, and her arrival in the US for early missteps, such as Days of Thunder and Batman Forever, is expressed in characteristically elegant sentences and punctuated with deliciously wry humour.
Thomson's consideration of his beloved's fascinating marriage to Tom Cruise is clearly hindered by legal constraints - the challenge of coming up with ever-different ways of saying "the allegations were without foundation" places particular strains on the prose - but he still manages to construct a mischievously amusing drama of fluctuating interdependent fortunes.
The most rewarding sections, however, are those in which Thomson brings his prodigious critical faculties to bear on the films themselves. The analysis of Jonathan Glazer's criminally underrated Birth, in which Kidman encounters a child apparently possessed by the spirit of her dead husband, lucidly and passionately presses the (to me) irrefutable case for the picture to be treated as an exercise in surrealism rather than as a superior shocker. Yet even that fine essay is hampered by the author's insistence on lauding various bits of Kidman's body and psyche.
It is, perhaps, only fair to point out that Thomson is not the first film critic who, even after reaching a certain age and acquiring intellectual respectability, has felt inclined to indulge himself in such a fashion.
In the 1970s, male writers for the Guardian and Sight and Sound - serious men who would never have publicly acknowledged the fullness of Raquel Welch's bosom - felt able to rave frantically about the erotic charms of Charlotte Rampling.
A decade earlier grim aesthetes with horn-rimmed glasses, apparently immune to the delights of Barbara Windsor, eulogised Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau with similarly breathless enthusiasm.
Some senior mandarin in the critical establishment has, it seems, decreed that grown-up writers are permitted to lust after female actors only so long as those performers are pale, glacial and ever so slightly sexless. Kidman, whose increasingly forbidding gaze and taut face now impede her from successfully playing any character not catatonically miserable (The Hours) or actually dead (The Others), is, according to this edict, sufficiently austere to allow Thomson his weird salivations. Imagine the response if the lascivious comments above had been made about, say, Pamela Anderson.
Would poor Mrs Thompson be any more or less unsettled if her husband's affections were so redirected? This undoubtedly long-suffering woman is first alluded to in a chapter examining Kidman's association with Chanel No 5. Thomson, who has occasionally bought the perfume for his wife, claims to like the smell. This is just as well, as, after glancing at this odd book, she would be quite justified in dashing a bottle of the stuff over his silly head.
Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times
Nicole Kidman By David Thomson Bloomsbury, 312pp. £18.99
