Gus Van Sant’s 1995 satirical black comedy To Die For begins in the midst of a news frenzy: Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon), a well-liked man who helped his family run their small-town Italian restaurant, has been murdered and his wife, Suzanne (Nicole Kidman), has been arrested as a suspect. The rest of the film, which blends mockumentary talking heads and flashbacks of the characters’ lives, sends up the contemporaneous sensationalism of high-profile criminal trials like those of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers. By showing the murder upfront, the film, written by the late Buck Henry, proceeds as a rebuke to the public’s fascination with whodunit by psychoanalyzing an already apprehended party.
Yet from the moment we first see Suzanne speaking directly into the camera in an interview, we need not spend too much time unpacking her psychological state. Perfectly coiffed and dressed in tones not quite bright enough to outshine her wide, gleaming smile, Suzanne makes an immediate impression as a media-savvy attention-seeker. Her countenance has a practiced vacancy to it, but no amount of poise can hide the naked hunger in her eyes as she gazes into the only object that means anything to her: the watching lens of a video camera.
Even the earliest flashbacks to Suzanne’s background reveal that unvarnished striving. When she first encounters Larry, she does so as seemingly the only young woman in town not besotted with him, yet she pursues him anyway for his own love-at-first-sight devotion to her and, perhaps, simply to be seen as the woman who got the most desired man around. The pair swiftly marry, and Suzanne turns their home into such a precisely ordered domestic space that it looks more like the set of a sitcom than a place where people actually live.
Soon, Suzanne sets out to boost her career aspirations, plotting a fantasized path to national fame via the stepping stone of local television news. Through it all, Kidman plays Suzanne with a shark-like intensity and constant forward motion that reflects how the woman treats every interaction as transactional. Seen today, Suzanne’s always-on personality looks eerily prescient of the present-day influencer era, unintentionally reminding us that social media and content creation didn’t birth the grindset so much as lower its barrier of access.
Kidman’s maximalist caricature finds a naturalistic contrast when Suzanne decides to kill Larry, whose humble ambitions threaten the promise of her future. She recruits a trio of oblivious accomplices by tantalizing the insecure Lydia (Alison Folland) with promises of heading out to California, and by outright seducing two delinquents, Russell (Casey Affleck) and Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix). The young actors play their parts with a realistic sense of insecurity, particularly Phoenix, whose antsiness and pained longing reveal just how quickly he mastered the magnetic screen presence that he’s wielded for the last three decades. The lived-in feel of the performances, and the empathy with which the characters are filmed, tethers what was otherwise a radical creative departure for Van Sant to earlier work like My Own Private Idaho.
In the way it cavorts with teen melodrama, black comedy, and docu-realism to reflect Suzanne’s contradictory masks, To Die For is a comic precursor to Van Sant’s Elephant. For all their tonal and aesthetic differences, the films share an interest in the impact that our image-saturated culture has on a society that promotes individualism and ambitious striving above all else.
Crucially, the film doesn’t single out Suzanne as unique in this respect, instead revealing how others naturally gravitate to even the faintest possibility of fame. Lydia proves just as eager to get on TV as Suzanne, while local station producer Ed (Wayne Knight), who always scoffed at Suzanne’s dream of turning her local weatherwoman gig into a path to stardom, cannot hide the glee from his voice as he boasts that some of the station’s footage aired on national news programs when the scandal erupted. Kidman offers a richly comic psychological portrait of a woman who sees herself as apart from the pack, but To Die For takes care to illustrate that she’s a product of a society that regularly produces people just like her.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s 4K transfer magnificently captures the subtleties of Eric Alan Edwards’s cinematography. The kitschy splashes of color in Suzanne’s home and clothes really pop, while the more naturalistic tones in the town’s rundown areas exude a tactile sense of grit. Film grain and video snow are well-preserved, respectively, in the lushly photographed flashbacks and the TV news footage. Contrast and color separation is consistent, as are black levels. The 5.1 audio track is free of any blemishes. There aren’t many elements to balance here in this mostly dialogue-driven feature, and the track sounds crisp and free of any muddled overlap.
Extras
Criterion include a new commentary track by director Gus Van Sant, cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards, and editor Curtiss Clayton, who provide a richly detailed breakdown of how they achieved the film’s clashing aesthetics, as well as a plethora of production anecdotes, such as details about Kidman’s extended audition process. The disc also comes with a booklet essay by critic Jessica Kiang, who situates the film within the contemporary context of criminal proceedings like the O.J. Simpson trial that had dramatically boosted true crime’s entertainment factor and made legal rubberneckers out of millions of Americans.
Overall
Gus Van Sant’s acidic dissection of America’s lurid obsession with true crime receives a gorgeous video transfer from the Criterion Collection.
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