Look! It’s Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber pasted on a billboard and dragged on a barge around the Sydney Harbour to publicise Netflix’s latest hit, the glossy domestic thriller The Perfect Couple.
In case you’re not one of the 20.3M viewers in 91 countries around the world who’ve watched the show in the week since it premiered, Kidman and Schreiber play Greer and Tag Winbury, the uber-wealthy and well-preserved parents of a groom-to-be at a wedding to be held in a picturesque Nantucket mansion. They seem to be the ultimate hosts for what promises to be the wedding of the season — until a body turns up on the beach.
Seeing these actors on a billboard is hardly news, and definitely not clever or subtle, but this Netflix PR stunt made us click, as pictures of Kidman are notorious for doing. After all, this is the face that sold billions of magazines in the heyday of paper mags, and Kidman’s intriguingly poreless and unlined visage continue to fascinate, even if, as some critics complain, she’s repeating herself yet again in this role: another uptight rich-bitch matriarch in a murder mystery reminiscent of Big Little Lies and The Undoing.
As ScreenHub reviewer Anthony Morris wrote: ‘The second you see Nicole Kidman in A Perfect Couple you know exactly what kind of character she’s playing. Dressed immaculately, hair done to perfection, make-up flawless; you don’t need a (French) supporting character to tell us she has a ‘stick up her arse-hole’. All of which, it goes without saying, is exactly what you want from Kidman in a murder mystery. Mess with her perfect world? You might end up floating face down in the bay.’
ScreenHub: A Perfect Couple, Netflix review – Kidman is highly entertaining
But still, The Perfect Couple is so much fun to watch. As Judy Berman wrote in Time, the Netflix thriller is ‘so unapologetically superficial … that the only surprise is how much fun it wrings out of a story saturated with soap and tropes’.
When times are economically tough, we tend to escape to wealthy worlds on screen. The most popular films in Depression-era 1930s were often the romantic comedies set among the rich and idle, which perhaps gives a hint as to why we now have seemingly insatiable appetites for streaming series about insanely wealthy and beautiful people behaving badly and concealing secrets in stunning locations. From The Crown to Knives Out and White Lotus, sometimes there’s room for sharp social commentary but often, it’s pure escapism. Perfect faces and bodies, deliciously bitchy dialogue, and a puzzle piece to chew on.
Which brings us to The Perfect Couple, an adaptation of the best-selling beach-read by Elin Hilderbrand, with Danish director Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, The Night Manager) brought in to give some class to the fairly soulless froth – as she did in The Undoing.
So, why is Netflix putting Nicole Kidman on a barge under the Sydney Harbour Bridge? It’s not entirely ridiculous. The murder mystery features rich people drinking a lot of champagne in priceless waterfront real estate. On Friday, the media release tells us, the barge will be anchored in front of the Watson’s Bay Hotel and fans are invited to enjoy a ‘bespoke cocktail dubbed ‘The Peachy Couple’ [that] has been created in honour of the series, a delicate peach and bergamot spritz that puts an ominous twist on the classic spring favourite.’
But call us cynical if we wonder if putting ‘Our Nicole’ on a Netflix billboard is also good optics for a mammoth international streamer.
As the global streaming services await delayed federal legislation on local Australian drama content quotas – and fight for their right to do it on their own terms without regulation – it can’t help to have an Australian actor paraded around. As Netflix was keen to point out in November 2023, in the previous four years it had invested in over $1 billion AUD on new Australian and Australian related films and shows.
For context, the local screen industry is pushing for a 20% local content quota, but streaming platforms are individually lobbying the government for as little as 2%. We look forward to hearing more soon.
In the meantime, see Nicole on a barge, alongside Schreiber – who happened to give a great Australian accent in PJ Hogan’s 2012 film Mental, no doubt assisted by the fact he was married to Australian actor Naomi Watts at the time.
Finally, and on a far less flippant note, Kidman recently rushed back from Venice to Sydney at the sad news of a death in the family, dedicating her best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival, for Babygirl, to her ‘brave and beautiful mother’.
