Vanity Fair traditionally does a large group cover for its Hollywood issue, with awards contenders draped languidly atop each other looking bored and not like themselves. And there is a group shot this year, but I believe it’s an interior photo; instead, Vanity Fair is promoting eight individual covers, describing them as “at play in fantastical habitats created by the artist-photographers Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.” They teased the cover drop with a post that said, “A surrealist journey awaits.” Surreal is indeed one way to describe the experience of looking at Nicole Kidman here. I’m not going to hold out on you. She’s first.
A note, though: Vanity Fair put videos of each person up first, and you have to swipe to the right to see the actual chosen cover (it’s different than the video’s thumbnail image — in Nicole’s case, so jarringly that I had perverse fun going back and forth). I’ll link to each one on Instagram in case the embeds don’t work. And now, no more waiting. Here is Nicole Kidman wearing Miu Miu from That Terrible Runway Show:
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I am usually exaggerating when I say something made me speechless, but this made me speechless. It looks like the cover of a shitty comic book written by a dude who believes he’s the voice of female empowerment for which women have been waiting. I fully support people of all ages feeling sexy and finding their groove with their bodies, but this particular outfit does not read “sexy” so much as “infantilizing.” A 54-year old Nicole Kidman can do a lot better than being turned into “Hit Me, Baby, One More Time,” no matter how catchy that song is. Britney was not 54 when she stomped down that school hallway, for good reason. This is not the early aughts and Nicole is not Britney, nor Fergie, nor anyone in “Lady Marmalade,” and that facial expression is bananas. How do you take Nicole Kidman’s raw material and do this with it, even if the point is surrealism? But the art itself isn’t surreal, particularly. It’s just subpar. It might be the worst magazine cover I have ever seen.
And it really doesn’t fucking help the cause for women, and for appreciating age and experience, when your cover model in her fifties is painted to the point of being half her age and half-cartoon (and like the star of a bad National Lampoon teen sex comedy), while your male cover model who’s 49 is allowed to look pretty much exactly like himself. Here is the aforementioned man, Idris Elba, seducing you from the back of a car:
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It’s not a great picture of him, per se, but it at least has life and spirit. Vanity Fair loves to put a clothed actress in a swimming pool, so it’s nice to see photographers somewhat taking the piss out of that trope, although I’d have enjoyed it more if, say, Jennifer Coolidge had gotten that assignment. Or even poor Nicole Kidman. Dear God. But at least Idris probably doesn’t hate this.
Kristen Stewart’s is… also interesting:
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Kristen Stewart has a really cool energy about her, and that energy is NOT “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue,” so I don’t know why they stuck her in a gold bodysuit and made her lie down with her back arched on a makeshift diving board. (The video makes a point of ending by showing the green-screen, as if we needed to be reassured she was merely littering popcorn all over the floor and not a city or even in someone’s pool. They do it with a few of them, actually, which… okay?) There are any number of ideas from the video clip that would have been more fun and illustrative of her vibe; I would’ve used one of her looking impish as she tossed the popcorn at the camera. Maybe they tried. But they brought her back around to a Maxim Lite kind of place, and given what they also did to Kidman… ugh. Thanks, I hate it.
Let’s see if Penelope Cruz fared any better:
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NOPE. Well, maybe. Her video is weird and lifeless, and I have to ask: Has she always had a clompy Julia Roberts gait, or is that just those shoes? (No shade. I too am clompy. I am concerned that I have singlefootedly turned the floors in our rental house very creaky.) She looks so flattened somehow in this image that even though she’s lying on top of a paint can and holding a paint brush, and clearly not IN the painting beneath her, parts of her fade into it. Maybe that’s the point. But she is not the star of this photo to me; this seems designed so that the concept was the star and Penelope was simply the body in the photo, and that’s a bummer.
From Pene to Bene, as in, of course, everyone’s favorite strange doctor, Beneficent Cottonweary:
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This video at least made me laugh, from the sheer randomness of it. This man is a good sport. I do not know who was huffing what when they came up with this idea with the swans, but it works? The cover photo is strange in the right ways, and even with an aggressive bird behind him, your eye is drawn straight to the man himself.
Next up, Simu Liu:
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This one, I quite like! He’s managed to put his body in a challenging physical position — I believe he actually IS jumping — without it having a negative effect on his facial expression, something that Tyra Banks would go on about on ANTM.
Michaela Jae Rodriguez just dances around in her video:
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Her cover looks overly retouched to me, too. Also, I have been sitting here trying to pose in such a way that I can decide whether she’s simply stretching herself to the limit, or they did some weird Photoshop that resulted in her shoulder being further away from her torso than usual. It LOOKS kind of like they moved her arm out, but… WHY. (Her hand wrapping around the tiger is also wacky. I get that it’s there so that we don’t lose her right arm altogether, but somehow that, too, looks unnatural, like it’s curving too far around the animal.)
Finally, my beloved Andrew Garfield, in a video scenario that will chill Jessica to her bones MAYBE DON’T WATCH JESSICA:
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I really don’t know why the movie portion of this was just him swinging around with a bunch of doves. The photo itself is charming. Great colors, great suit, great pop against a still-lively backdrop, cute pose that doesn’t look anguished, limbs where they are meant to be, and his face looks like his face. WAS THAT SO HARD? JUSTICE FOR NICOLE (and several others).
Here is the whole group photo, which you can see in two pieces on Instagram by swiping (and from that first link, you can also read all the short pieces attached to each). The first cluster is Idris, Penelope, Kristen, and Broadchurch Chuzzlewit, who all look fine? Kristen gets the dirty kicks with her fancy net dress, which captures her better than a gold lame maillot does (even with jeans). Penelope looks a bit forgotten, and they pasted it together such that it looks like she’s stepping on Kristen. Chuzzlewit is wearing a surprising amount of ruffles, but with gusto. In the next one, Andrew and Simu and Michaela Jae look like part of the same story and then Nicole is some weird outlier. I can’t put my finger on why. She just looks kind of jaundiced, and also as if her pose doesn’t make sense, like, if her left leg isn’t up on a stair then why is it bent that way? It’s not great. Not as bad as a lot of those group pictures are, but… there’s a reason it’s not the cover. Then again, there is NO reason why some of those covers are covers, so far be it from me to try and figure out what they were thinking.
