It's impossible for me to describe how good Julianne Moore is in Laws of Attraction, now available on dvd, without saying a few unkind words first, just when they're least warranted.
Moore first gained major attention in the movies in Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, a powerfully simple staging of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In it she is, as always, stark staring gorgeous as well as highly skilled, but she's also awfully self-conscious, tight-jawed. Her effects, such as her hard-edged laughter that breaks out like hysteria, seem especially calculated next to Brooke Smith, with her imperceptible transitions between emotions. Smith gives perhaps the most unaffected great performance in American movies, and I couldn't help feeling that critics, responding like Dr. Astrov in the play, looked past her to Moore because of Moore's looks.
Moore usually gets respectful reviews at least, and is also popular with her nominating fellow actresses in the AMPAS despite having extremely limited audience rapport. She's a star for an upscale female audience--she wears beautiful clothes beautifully, her lustrous red hair and gleaming-bloodless skin look expensively maintained, she has flawless bearing and poise. Moore's acting is intelligent but resolutely toward the cool end of the thermometer, and its limitations in Vanya on 42nd Street have become more pronounced with time and with a string of roles that play into those limitations.
In Todd Haynes's Safe (1995) and Far from Heaven (2002), and in The Hours (2002; click here for my review), Moore's emblematic specialty is that glassy, far-away, I'm-not-really-smiling smile that the conventional world has made her characters wear. This repression results from social forces that keep women cooped up in suburban homes where no one can hear them scream. If only they had the gumption to scream. (How can her teeny little stammering good-girl voice not be meant as a joke in Safe?) And they often look as if they're wincing, or would be if their blood pressure were a little higher and they could just focus on the bad feelings. As these depressive entombed brides Moore doesn't give us big moments but the suppression of them. The personal may be political in these movies, but it's not especially personal.
The problem from a dramatic standpoint is that from the outset Moore's characters read as incapable of happiness. Has any screen beauty ever come across as less susceptible to simple pleasure? So when things start falling apart it doesn't seem as bad for them as it would be for a woman with a full range of responses. In Safe she plays a wife who actually does have a headache, every night, and who apologizes for it to her husband. (True, she may have an immune system deficiency, and how would you like that? But in the movie, with its attenuated rhythms and non-committal view of her ailment, its air of Stepford Wives alienation and stasis, her illness, whether organic or psychosomatic, symbolizes the sterility of suburban monogamy.) In these roles Moore is a victim, not a heroine. She fades and we're supposed to identify with her although she hasn't exerted herself much to find a more fulfilling way of living.
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Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
excellent job Alan, very subtle and thorough analysis of Moore, I learned a lot - thanks!
2 - sadi
Alan , thx for this. I've always admired Moore's incredible beauty and you describe that well. I actually thought The End of the Affair was a really good adaptation, but that's okay. It was true to the book and the chemistry between Fiennes and Moore struck me as quite real and believable - she's very comfortable with herself nude and that's sexy to me. but that said, i see what you are saying about her holding back a bit - that sounds true enough. I thought she was magnificent in Magnolia, as was (incredibly) Tom Cruise who did a remarkable job.
Thx for this - as a fan of Moore, it gives me a lot of information and other films to see as well.
Cheers,
Sadi
3 - visualsimplicity
I never thought of Moore's acting in that way, but yeah, she does sort of have that restrained (maybe nervous) chuckle going. I'm going to have to disagree with Sadi and agree with you, Alan, on her job in Magnolia. However, I'm going to agree with Sadi on Tom though. I can't argue this point enough, but I thought he was completely robbed of the Oscar for his role in that film. As good as Michael Caine is, I felt Tom did much better that year. Oh well.
4 - Alan Dale
Thanks for all the comments. I feel a little guilty b/c Moore IS clearly talented and dedicated, way above average, plus she seems like a nice person. That said, I wish she could let loose more the way she does in Laws of Attraction. Is she really comfortable being naked on film or is it just that she does it if it fits her concept of the role (which is a way of not being in your naked body while it's being filmed)? I just can't see her shaking it in a movie for the hell of it.
As for Magnolia: I'm not a Tom Cruise fan. He's a hard-worker, with lots of energy and focus, but he's strictly "product." My favorite participants in that movie were Henry Gibson, Melinda Dillon, and the frogs.
5 - mb
Your not serious thinking your interruption of Julianne Moore is accurate. The two films that she's been chastise for, you think are her better performance? If you want to write a lengthy article about an actress then maybe next time you should do some research on what motivates the actress. Julianne Moore has publicly stated that she does not want to be a "movie star", she wants to be an actress. She does not want to be a larger then life character that saves the world, she simply wants to do stories about real people. Which she has done quite well.
6 - Dave Nalle
So I guess I'm the only one who finds her pompous, creepy and irritating?
Dave
7 - Alan Dale
I think I can "agree" in some sense with both of the last two posts, though mb isn't going to like this "interruption" of Moore's career any more than my original one: the problem with Moore is that she cares far more about her art than she does about the audience's enjoyment of it. The exception is Laws of Attraction, in which she lets loose with an amazing blend of skill and instinct. I kept rewinding little moments just to relive the kick I got out of her expressions and gestures and vocal tricks.