To grasp face values, read between the lines

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face – how often do I have to go on saying that in this column? I grant you that with Shakespeare you have to be careful who's speaking before you decide to adopt a quotation, else you find yourself concurring with the thoughts of fools or rogues. I'm always surprised, for example, how often we hear "The lady doth protest too much, methinks", given that the person to whom that line originally belonged was an incestuous adultress incapable of believing that a protestation of fidelity could ever be sincere. Equally unwise to trust kind King Duncan who, throughout his reign, staggered from one wrong facial construction to another. Still and all, it is frequently the case with human faces, as it is not with the countenances of cats and dogs and goldfish, say, that we do not have a clue what we are looking at.

I take this to be the lesson, anyway, of the Bafta awarded to Nicole Kidman last week for her performance as Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours. It is well known that Nicole Kidman was fitted with a prosthetic nose for this part, her own hoydenish Australian version being too turned-up and flimsy to suggest the creation of great literature. Whether a nose of substance is indispensable to the writing of good prose I do not know, but I have yet to meet a novelist of any distinction with a snub or button or retroussé nose. Poets, yes. Critics, invariably. But never novelists. So it was wise of somebody to bolster Nicole Kidman's face with that which it has always wanted. Thereafter the Bafta – and no doubt, it will prove, the Oscar, too – was in the bag.

She has won it for the nose, that's what I am saying. I don't simply mean she has won it for looking unlike herself, though one should never underestimate the degree to which looking unlike yourself will influence a film jury. I mean she has won it because of the gravitas – literally the quality of being weighty – that the prosthesis lends her face. Reader, it is so heavy she cannot lift her head. Because of the weight of her false nose, she has no choice but to look down and a little to the side and nod occasionally, like a wise parrot, which economy of movement convinces us she must be serious and therefore acting well.

I never met Virginia Woolf, though I know many women who consider themselves to be her intimate – which is, of course, the subject of The Hours: female neurasthenia passed on like a baton down the ages through the quivering pages of a book – but I would imagine that in real life she did indeed look down and a little to the side and nod, if not because of the weight of her nose, then because of the weightiness of her thoughts. People who are forever planning a watery death for themselves don't meet your eye. They can't. Their thoughts are underneath whatever it is you're standing on. Thus Nicole Kidman, who was so unconvincing in Moulin Rouge on account of her all-round vamplessness, in particular the poor job she made of filling the top of a stocking where some anticipatory tension between flesh and silk must be visible, has, thanks to a false nose, convinced us she knows how it feels to be Virginia Woolf. There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face, but the construction itself is all art and wins you Baftas.

The other people having trouble reading faces in recent times are the dramatis personae of Coronation Street. The long awaited unmasking of the street's serial family-man and killer – hard to say which we have hated him for most, loving too uxoriously his present wife or butchering his previous ones – came and went in a cloud of self-psychodiagnostic clichés, an anti-climax, as it was bound to be, given the period allowed to elapse between his crimes and his confession. A delicate business, keeping up the viewer's ire. Too soon and there's your ratings blown. Too tardy and our native hue of resolution yellows into forgetfulness and indifference. As for the moment of catharsis, when it comes, you have to be careful not to say too much. "The rest is silence," was adequate to Shakespeare's purposes. Or even better: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak a word." There isn't always, after all, a lot that evil has to say for itself. The catch is, "Demand me nothing" won't fill a half-hour slot.

But then come-uppance isn't what the Richard Hillman story has ever really been about. The blind stupidity of the populace is the true subject, the inadequacy of the chorus to event, the near certainty that when the people judge and speak they will be wrong. Interesting, how severe on its viewers a soap can be. One minute we are invited to see ourselves in this or that good neighbour, fretting over a mortgage or upside down in the bonnet of a car, the next we are being shown that when it comes to character, to what we read in a person's face, to the foundations on which we build our trust, we cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw.

A brave parable, this is how I read it, on our present political situation. Only Audrey (Blair) and Norris (Straw) and Archie the funeral director (Prescott) alive to the machinations of Richard Hillman aka Saddam Hussein, the rest – Ms Dynamite who caused such pain to Toyah; Ken Livingstone who's married to the cop, at home all day with the baby; and that monster of sanctimoniousness, Harold Pinter, on the piss, not knowing why Janice would rather eat rats' eyes than go back to listen to his poetry – blind to what's happening in front of their very noses.

No art to find the mind's construction in the face, but it wouldn't hurt to be a little smarter than we are.