As a victim she's a peculiar fantasy object, offering masochism without eroticism. (Even in The End of the Affair her nude sex scenes have a peculiarly objective quality, as if she could represent desire without quite embodying it.) Her kind of masochism is moral masochism--she's the idealized supersensitive female, too delicate for this coarse-grained world. Her performances are meticulously controlled, her face a liquid crystal display screen of unspoken pain, but she's limited by her own impressive control. At times she's so purposefully tight her technique threatens to take her all the way around the board and back to Tippi Hedren, square zero.

Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) was one time Moore showed some energy, and it didn't work, either. In her defense, the role of a woman who loves the dying old man she married for money so much she can't live with the guilt is unplayable nowadays. It's like a Joan Crawford role from the '40s, the inherently noble fur-clad sinner who can find redemption only in death. The part shouldn't burn that many calories--nobility just shone off the Crawford mask. Agitated to delirium, and throwing herself around the house, her attorney's office, the pharmacy, Moore pushes her technique in a role so tacky there's nothing technique can do for it. She's aerobically mannered without being convincing at the simplest level, as a girl who netted a rich husband with sex. It's a godawful performance, the most serious lapse in her natural good taste, which otherwise seems like the main thing holding her back.

I don't blame her for The End of the Affair (1999), Neal Jordan's overripe yet immaculately "literary" treatment of Graham Greene's unmatched work of classy spiritual porn. It's the story of an adulterous affair in London during World War II between a government official's wife (Moore) and her novelist lover (Ralph Fiennes), whom she walks away from, without telling him why, when he's injured in the Blitz and she promises God to give him up if he survives. The material needs a compulsive, trash-loving hand to keep the goo stirred up, but the movie is so earnestly narrated (and so insistently, lest we miss a particle of its richness) that Moore while unusually responsive nevertheless seems encased in it.

In her stunning period suits, with linings and kick-pleats in heated contrasting colors, Moore is an exquisite animated mannequin who suffers emotionally, morally, physically. Even the graphic sex scenes are too deliberate--the movie uses them to romanticize the characters' religious torment. The lovers are miserable and yet so dang glamorous the movie seems to think we'll envy them. You and I would just be screwing around on the side but when these two go at it they feel the earth move, and then heaven itself. (They tempt Fate, which deigns to respond.)

It plays not like a recreation of, but an artifact from, the past, one of those movies like The Garden of Allah, Camille, Waterloo Bridge, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Brief Encounter about great yet impossible loves. So why isn't it fun? The whole thing is beyond purple and yet so careful and reverent you can't even enjoy it as camp. (It could work if they just pulled back a bit from the material--let the sheets dry before waving them like banners--and played into the irony of the situation. But that wouldn't appeal to the English Patient crowd it's targeted at. For all the wit, I didn't laugh once.)