HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'The most daring thing about Babygirl isn't the sex.'

There's a moment in Babygirl when we follow a close-up of a Botox needle sliding into Nicole Kidman's lineless forehead.

In the film, her character, Romy, is a tech company CEO and mother of two whose self-care, self-optimisation routine is appropriately rigorous. She's frequently in a cryogenic tank or pounding her body in diligent workouts or stretching out on the Pilates reformer. Every inch disciplined, controlled, Romy is wrapped and draped in cashmere coats and sleeveless metallic gowns and always, always wearing the spiked-high heels of the stereotyped alpha woman.

Watch: The Babygirl trailer. Post continues after video.

Romy's daughter teases her about her filled lips and what she calls her 'dead fish' face, taunting her mother with no understanding of the pressure and expectation a woman, not a girl, feels when performing in a male-dominated world. One where appearing to be flawless, youthful, endlessly, effortlessly energetic feels like the bare minimum requirement for continuing to play in the big leagues without reminding any of the Big Men Bosses of their mothers. No wrinkles, no dimples, no hormonal slumps allowed. 

A world, it seems, a lot like Hollywood.

Or, at least, how Hollywood has always been.

Performing a Botox injection onscreen might be as daring for Kidman - whose face comes under endless, tedious scrutiny - as the much-more discussed scenes in Babygirl. The ones where she's on her hands and knees drinking milk from a saucer. The ones where she's standing facing the corner of a grim hotel room like a chastened schoolgirl on the order of her younger, dominating lover. The ones where she performs orgasms in the tightest of frames. The ones where she is naked.

All of those, Kidman has said, were safe, comfortable, necessary, in the hands of her maestro, the 49-year-old Dutch director Halina Riejn, who wanted to make a movie about power and sex through a very female lens. She's done that. Babygirl is not really like much you see on the mainstream screen. At least, not until recently. That is risky.

But revealing the eternal, external pressure to stay something like young, taut, put-together? Taboo. Almost as big a taboo as your work intern pushing his fingers into your mouth in your mentoring session, or telling your husband he's never given you an orgasm. Or finding a young man dancing with a glass of whisky to George Michael's Father Figure pant-droppingly hot.

Nicole Kidman as Romy in Babygirl. Image: A24.

Yes, Babygirl is a trip.

And I bounced out of the cinema after seeing it, because an actress of Kidman's age and stature had been given a beautiful big sexy shame-free adventure in that movie. A statement that risks can still be taken when you're at the age Hollywood used to assign only to cuckolded wives or jealous mothers of beautiful young daughters or endlessly self-sacrificing maternal saints. And yes, we might all have a touch of those tropes in us on different days, but holy sh*t if it doesn't suddenly seem like the world has woken up to the idea that women over 40, over 50, over 60 have other roles that occupy them, too. Women like Romy, who has left it this long, or perhaps only just knew herself well enough to pursue the kind of sex and pleasure she has always wanted, problematic as it might prove.

I said in MID's end of year episode that it felt, in a way, like 2024 was the year The Culture discovered mid-women.

And it holds. Because now it feels like Generation X's female icons are owning Hollywood's award season. Women we have been watching for decades. Women who we grew up alongside and would measure ourselves against if we weren't all wise enough to know we're not playing on the same field.

The bookies say that Demi Moore is likely to win the Oscar for Best Actress this year. She got a Golden Globe, after all, and is also up for a coveted SAG Award, for The Substance, another movie about women and power and age, albeit without the nudity and kink and with a heavy dose of schlocky gore.

But these are our actresses.

Demi is 62. Kidman is 57.

Another SAG nominee is Pamela Anderson, also 57.

Angelina Jolie is also on the awards circuit this year. She's 49 and, it's fair to say, has been through the kind of midlife divorce that makes you circle the wagons for a time, then get back out there and learn opera for an awards-bait biopic of Maria Callas. Okay, so that's not quite a relatable experience, but you see where I'm going.

Jodie Foster won a Globe too. She's 62. We've been watching her since she was a literal child.

Blanchett, of course, will be pulling on a dress for the SAGs, nominated again. She's 55 now.

These are the very visible queens of Generation X.

We know who these women married, who they divorced. We know their kids' names, and we've watched their faces change like our own. And then, mostly, we watch their faces stop changing for a while. Tighten, slacken, tighten, soften, like us, but more so. Like us but richer, better looking and with the cursed double-edged blade of ageing in public pressed to their throats.

She looks great. For her age. This is what 60 looks like now. What has she done to her face? Such a shame. Such good work. So natural. So fake. Why would you do that to yourself? Why wouldn't you make more of an effort? If I had her money, I'd do… everything.

And so on. Growing old alongside us, but seemingly in a completely different world.

Thing is, if we're watching Nicole drinking her milk, or Demi making a deal with the forever-young devil, or Jolie singing under the diva's trademark cat eye, and only counting wrinkles, and sags, and measuring them next to ours, we're missing the point.

These women are not only still working. They're at the top of their game. They're getting, in Moore's case, what they've always wanted, at the exact time that conventional Hollywood wisdom would tell them to shuffle off and make room for Sydney Sweeney and Zendaya. Who would have thought there's room for women of all ages in storytelling if you're telling actual authentic stories about women's lives, and not only reflecting a refracted view of the section of a woman's timeline that men deemed interesting, titillating or complimentary?

But the needle and scalpel are hard to ignore. In Babygirl, Kidman's Romy looks strangely ageless. It is entirely believable that Kidman's face would be her's. She doesn't look young, she doesn't look old. She looks like a woman who's entirely metabolised the information that not "letting herself go" is part of her permission pass to play in this world.

Is it a coincidence that roles for women over starlet age have become more plentiful in lockstep with ever-improving treatments to keep them looking younger?

And if so, does that matter?

Is there still a two-tier system in place for us mortal MIDs? Thin, filled and fashionable? Tick, you can remain visible, aspirational, celebrated as still relevant and wise. A little baggy and thickened now? Laugh lines and sun spots and grooves carved from experience? No, you remind us too much of that old version of midlife, we're erasing that one along with your crows' feet. Please step aside.

Listen to MID where Holly shares more of her thoughts on Nicole Kidman's "controversial" new film, Babygirl. Post continues after audio.

Right now, I am watching Lisa Kudrow in No Good Deed. A twisty, silly, sad and funny Netflix show.

She's brilliant in it. A true Gen X icon along with all the other Friends that Gen Z put aside their ick at fat suits and clumsy-flirts to hoover up as we did. Kudrow looks like us in it. Well, like us if we were tall and blonde with a bone structure that could shave carrots.

But she looks tired when she's tired. Exhausted and hollowed out by what life has thrown at her character, who's lost a child, confidence-tricked herself out of a career and whose marriage is crumbling. Like us, she looks dressed up and glorious for dinner, schlubby and crumpled in her sweater at home.

Does it matter? All this attention to the most visible of ways we are no longer like we were, rather than a celebration and exploration of all the ways we've grown and evolved that can't be seen through a camera's lens.

It's what they're still doing, and what we're still doing, that matters. Demi Moore just won her first-ever acting award at 62. She didn't need to keep trying, I doubt she's juggling mortgage stress and prescription anxiety.

She just wasn't done. And knew she was better than she'd been judged and written off as, until a female director - just like Babygirl's - came and outstretched a hand for a mutually beneficial big swing.

And that's what we can do for each other, us MIDs.

In this next season of the podcast MID - conversations for Gen X women who are anything but - I'm going to be talking to another dinner-table full of women who are not done. Some of them you'll know. Some of them you'll meet for the first time.

There are stories about falling in love in midlife, of losing everything and rebuilding. There are stories about changing your mind about sex, about the friendships that sustain us. About how we look and how we think and what it's like to to be married to one person for more than half your life. Stories about what's important and some snort laughing about what's not.

If award-show judges and Hollywood and TikTok and prime time have all decided that the women of Gen X are worth keeping around to see what they can still do, they've just caught up to what we know - we're doing our best work, whether that's the kind you get paid for, get meaning from, holds others together, or just the kind you do to keep moving each day.

We're everywhere, MIDs. So come sit beside me, and let's talk.

Holly Wainwright is an author and the host of podcasts MID and Mamamia Out Loud. You can listen to those, here.

Read more from Holly:

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'Why I'm having a Year of "Nup".'

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Why we all need to write a D**khead List.

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'For me, sobbing in a tent was the first sign.'

Feature image: A24.