Aussie Does It

"So, 'Australia,' " she says, steering it back to the talk of movies, although in the case of this movie, it's just another big mystery -- why she did it, what's in it, who will go see it.

'I Love Perfectionism'

Kidman participates in strange movies, and willfully so. She has said over and over that for her it's about the director -- it has been ever since the two years she and Cruise spent locked in the codependent perfectionism of Stanley Kubrick, for 1999's impressively imploded "Eyes Wide Shut." Kidman's movies since are either high-budget forays or low-budget passion projects, and not in between.

Moviegoers often give her the overall meh, but film students afford her the compliment of deep scrutiny.

David Thomson, one of the best film writers and scholars alive (author of "The Whole Equation," "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" and the just-released "Have You Seen . . . ?"), wrote a 267-page assessment of her career in his poetic 2006 book "Nicole Kidman." Some saw it as a mash note from a crazy old man, but it's difficult to find anything better written about what it means to be modern movie star. She learned how to be famous, and then she learned how to be interesting.

In concept, and sometimes in execution, Kidman's choices can be seen as an unflinching act of courage and artistry -- if you squint. When, for example, a director wants her to do a graphic sex scene, she'll do it. She'll do rape, abuse, deep pain. In "Fur," as an imaginary version of Diane Arbus, she erotically shaved all the fake body hair off a hirsute Robert Downey Jr. She'll do furious masturbation ("Margot at the Wedding"), she'll do nude, she'll verge on pedophilia. (That last one was in 2004's "Birth" -- some say it was her best movie, only who ever saw it?) Generally, she'll rip her heart out in take after take. She did get an Oscar, after all. (In 2003, for playing Virginia Woolf in "The Hours." Her cruelest detractors say the prosthetic nose won.)

But she won't do any of these things without the right story, the right script and the right director.

"If it's small or big, it doesn't matter," she says. "I'm just not interested in a laissez-faire, oh-we'll-just-see-how-it-comes-out moviemaking process. People think there aren't people like that making movies, but there absolutely are," she says. "Every time I worked for someone like that, it fell apart. I do better with an obsessive-compulsive personality. I love perfectionism. . . . And if I can continue the Oz metaphor from ['Australia'], there are very few Wizards of Oz out there. You pull back the curtain on the ideas that people say they all have, the films they all keep saying they're going to make . . . and it's not really there a lot of times. . . . The great directors are the ones who are never finished with it, and the film winds up being dragged out of their hands, wrenched really. That's my kind of director."

A Different Focus

Talking of craft this way is fine, unless you're a bean counter. This year Forbes magazine ranked Kidman as its No. 1 overpaid actor, based on the math alone. She earns anywhere from $15 million to $20 million for the big-budget stuff. "The Invasion" (a sci-fi retread for the 9/11 age) was released last summer and cost $80 million to build, and took in only $15 million in domestic box office gross. "The Golden Compass" reportedly cost $180 million (yow!) and didn't recoup even half that in tickets. The "Bewitched" remake in 2005 did flat business, too, costing $85 million and grossing $62 million domestic. (Recent success: "Happy Feet" in 2006, a penguin cartoon she helped voice, grossed $198 million.)

"My hunch, and I may be wrong, is that the public is not crazy about her anymore. She's getting old and she can't do anything about that," says Thomson, but don't read this as a slam. He sees it as the beginning of Kidman as golden-era Katharine Hepburn.

"Nicole unmistakably proved herself over several films as someone who is open. She delivered some extraordinary work that shows just how wide-ranging an actress she is. The smaller films, that's what I want to see more of," Thomson says. "But she has a lot of overhead, I imagine, and she has to do these bigger pictures and maintain it all. My sense is she's a very complicated, perhaps chilly person who wants to present as a warm person. But it's the complicated person who is so much more interesting [on film]."

(For the record, Kidman did speak briefly by phone to Thomson while he was writing "Nicole Kidman." But once the book came out, he never heard from her again. One of her Australian publicists said Kidman had been "misled" by granting Thomson an interview.)

"I don't know if I'm entering a new phase or not," Kidman says, rubbing her forehead. (Reader, look! It moves. She has wrinkles. Hooray.) "But I do feel like I'm at the beginning of something. I'm purposely saying I have no idea what's next. It's a great place to be in. It used to be a terrifying place for me to be in, and now I'm more terrified if I have three movies lined up. My focus is different. At the same time I hope it doesn't mean my artistic life is, um, over."

About the Homeland

This is a long way of saying there's lot riding on "Australia."

Baz Luhrmann calls us a week ago to rave about his friend Nicole -- her performance! Her strength! Her journey! Yes, yes.

He is on his way to catch a flight from New York to Sydney. When he lands in Sydney, he will have exactly seven hours to tweak it once more and hand it in. (One rumor going around: There is no ending. Another rumor: There are six different endings and the studio keeps changing its mind.) "I'll tell you, I'm in the car and we've driven by eight billboards promoting 'Australia,' " he says, sounding frantic.

It's about their homeland, after all. She was born in Hawaii, she lived in Washington as a toddler (she remembers eating snow there), and her parents returned to Australia in the early '70s, where she was raised. Notice that so very many actors now seem to be Australian: Jackman, Naomi Watts, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe (who originally signed up to do Jackman's role in "Australia," then backed out) and the late Heath Ledger. Kidman met Keith Urban, also Australian, at an L.A. party to promote tourism Down Under.

Baz is Australian, too, and he's not only trying to make a love story and a hit picture, he's trying to, as Kidman puts it, "put a whole country in there." Since Kidman hit Hollywood nearly 20 years ago, she's played an Australian only once.

Even now, she plays the outsider: Lady Sarah Ashley, a neglected wife who comes from England to the Northern Territory in 1939 to sell off a cattle ranch and confront her cheating husband, only to find he's been murdered. Instead she falls headlong into an adventure, and an epic appreciation of the lonely continent. She becomes attached to an aboriginal child, gets droved by Jackman's Drover, and swept up in World War II. The land "consumes her, and she becomes part of the place," Kidman says.

What's it like to have a big movie like this coming out, critics ready to pounce?

"Does it keep me up at night? No," she says. "Do I care deeply, do I not want to see the people who are involved in it fail? Yes, of course. I would love it to be a success. Will I be able to step foot in Australia after this? I hope so."

She cracks herself up. "But, you know, my country will survive whether this film is good or not."

She goes on: "At this age, I have things pretty much in perspective. Nothing is ever as good as it seems, and nothing is ever as bad. Which seems a very simple thing to say, but it's the truth, that's what it is. I passionately work hard on a film and then I let it go. I just have to. . . . I'm committed to my art form as a lifetime journey. That's where it stands. I also have my kids and my life and my whole other thing that gives me a purpose and a reason to be around."

She's found a whole new continent she likes: America. The one between Los Angeles and New York, which she admits she'd hardly ever seen before. She's a fan of riding around in her husband's luxury tour bus, to his concert dates at state fairs and speedways. She likes to sneak away and go to people's garage sales. "All I need is a hat, and I go," she says. She bought little ceramic candle holders at one sale, she says, and embroidered Christmas stockings at another, "when it wasn't anywhere near Christmastime. I love it."

According to Nicole Kidman, the people at these garage sales almost never know she's Nicole Kidman, which is the highest sort of compliment, in her world.