Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) has always dreamed of being on TV - and she's dead-set on making that dream come true. But there is just one obstacle: Larry Maretto her husband (Matt Dillon). So Suzanne convinces a love-struck teenager (Jaoquin Phoenix) to get Larry out of the way - for good.
"To Die For" is a brilliantly vicious satire of the media, an ahead-of-its-time look at a world in which, as Nicole Kidman's character says at the beginning of the film, you're not really anybody unless you're on TV. Kidman gives the performance of a lifetime as Suzanne Stone, a dim-witted but predatorial woman who will do literally anything to get her face on TV, and if even her earnest but low-class husband (Matt Dillon) gets in her way, she has no qualms about simply eliminating the obstacle. To this end, she enlists a trio of idiotic trailer trash high schoolers (Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, and Alison Folland) to kill him off. This story, based on true events but spiced up with plenty of biting dialogue and vibrant details, is related in the fractured, fragmentary style of a TV documentary, with everyone Suzanne knows being interviewed and telling stories about her. Director Gus Van Sant constructs a perfect pastiche here, stitching together the full story from the accounts of a multitude of characters, some of them appearing in talk show roundtable discussions or on-camera interviews. There are many shots of characters on TV screens, especially Suzanne, who also spends much of the film directly addressing the camera against a plain white background. Kidman is phenomenal here. Even the way she moves her mouth, the tightly controlled movements of her lips, gives the impression of someone who is thinking about external appearances at every possible second. This is a harsh but hilarious dark comedy with amazing central performances and a highly original approach to the visual style, fitting for a film that so thoroughly satirizes media representations.
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A cable-TV weather girl who'll do anything to become a celebrity seduces a high school student and convinces him to kill her go-nowhere husband in this black comedy. Gus Van Sant's sly satire on America's tabloid mentality is loosely adapted from Joyce Maynard's chronicle of the real-life tale of husband-killer Pamela Smart.
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