In a review of Mary
& George this past year I mentioned that there are few actresses who bare
themselves emotionally as well as physically as Julianne Moore has in my
lifetime. I originally rented Chloe to see Moore to do the former and
was rewarded by that. I wasn’t expected her to spend far more time doing the
latter and doing it brilliantly.
Moore was very busy between
2009 and 2010; that same year she got just as naked for comic purposes in the sublime
comedy The Kids are All Right a movie which earned Oscar nominations for
everyone except, no surprise, Moore. As I’ve mentioned in the previous article
for a woman whose received five Oscar nominations and one Academy Award to date
she still seems ridiculously underrecognized by, well, everyone. She is one of
the few actresses to be nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress
in the same year (2002 for Far From Heaven and The Hours) and in
all honesty it should have happened in 1999 as well. And in keeping with the
Oscars nominating performers for the wrong film she was nominated for Best
Actress in the overblown The End of The Affair and ignored for her
incredible work in Magnolia, a film that has entered the world of
classic far longer. Moore bares her flesh in Affair but she’s restrained
in everything else. In Magnolia she lays everything all out on the table
and nobody listens to her. And in keeping with how the Oscars get it wrong more
often than not, the Oscar she won was for Still Alice, which is frankly
the least surprising work of her career.
Moore spends as much
of her career in roles where the emotions are always just beneath the surface
and she honestly does that nearly as well as any other actress working in my
lifetime. She did so perfectly in both Far From Heaven and The Hours playing
two very different 1950s housewives burdened by their era; Charley the friend
of Colin Firth’s A Single Man who is his soulmate despite his sexual
preference; Emily is Crazy, Stupid, Love who deals with the burden of
her life by having an affair. She was already fifty when Chloe was being
made but age cannot wither nor can she scale her divinity. When she suspects
her husband of infidelity you do question why anyone would push Moore aside for
a younger model.
Moore plays
Catherine Stewart, a gynecologist living in Toronto, apparently a successful one.
(Like all professionals in the movies, she lives in a house that looks straight
out of Architectural Digest.) One day she looks down from her office window and
sees a woman who behaves very much like a high-priced call-girl. Catherine is
not the kind of person who would judge this; the two have a line of work which
must involve a frequent crossover. Then her husband David comes back late from
his flight from Toronto and she finds a disturbing photo on his iPhone.
The next day she
goes back to the hotel where she saw the girl in question, makes eye contact
with her in the bar and arranges for the two of them to talk in the powder room.
That girl is Chloe who with perfect calm tells her that single women are not
usually her clients. Couples, sometimes.
The moment that I
first saw Amanda Seyfried on Season 1 of Big Love I knew by the time
Season 1 was over that I was looking at the next great actress. I had missed Mean
Girls somehow as well as her work on Veronica Mars but even if I had
seen either I knew that playing Sarah, the oldest daughter of the Hendrickson
clan I was looking at one of the most accomplished actresses of my generation
and she wasn’t even 21 when the first season ended. This is only slight
hyperbole on my part. I’ve always considered Big Love one of the most
underrated shows of the 2000s (look for an article in that series down the road)
and while this was a show filled with some of the best performers working at
the time, among them Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer
Goodwin – all of whom were doing by far some of the best work they ever did in
any medium – that I never took my eyes off Seyfried the moment she appeared on
screen. Sarah was the only character who knew from the beginning of the series
just how potentially poisonous her family was and had the clearest moral
compass. Like Sydney Sweeney a decade later she had the face of a doe-eyed
innocent, but there was always something lurking beneath the surface, something
on the verge of complete breakdown. She was by far the character I cared about
the most on that series and while I was sad she left the series before the
final season aired, I knew great things were ahead of her, things that Mamma
Mia! hadn’t even come close to
tapping.
In the title role we
get what is the first great performance of Seyfried as an adult actress. She
may be half Catherine’s age but its clear from the moment they meet that she’s wiser and more experienced than the
older woman. Moore is almost always the wiser woman in so many of the films she
does; here we see her mixing being both
emotionally raw as well as easily manipulated. Catherine tells Chloe she
suspects her husband is having an affair and she wants to test to see if he
would pick up another woman. She tells Chloe where her husband has lunch every day.
For a movie that is
about sex in so many ways much of the sex is discussed graphically rather than
performed. There are several meetings that follow where Chloe meets with
Catherine and, in the manner of someone discussing a grocery list, tells her
about their meetings. She describes their encounters in such detail and so
unemotionally that the viewer, like Catherine, has no reason to doubt her.
Just as Seyfried was
superb at holding the screen with performers twice her age on Big Love, she
is just as impressive in her scenes with Moore. We’ve seen Chloe lay herself
bare, both in scenes professional and clinical. She tells Catherine that she’s
good at what she does because its clear she’s clever enough to know what the
client desires – really desires, as opposed to what they say they do. With each
meeting she begins to talk in more graphic details about her encounters. You
would expect Catherine to be jealous or dissolute. But with each encounter we
read Moore’s face just well enough to know there’s something going on that she herself
may not be aware of.
Eventually she
breaks off the arrangement. Then she ends up going to the same hotel where
Chloe is. What follows is the scene that I was expecting but what makes it
erotic – not pornographic – is that watching it you can tell very clear that
even though Catherine supposedly initiated the encounter Chloe put the idea in
her head. When it ends, she finally seems dissolute that has nothing to do with
the encounter – or even the fact that she’s just had one with the same woman
her husband did.
It seems I’ve told
you too much. I’ve actually only scratched the surface. It might make sense if
you knew of Egoyan’s work. Many if not most of his films are set in Canada and
seem to be about things they actually aren’t. In Exotica, a movie that
Roger Ebert listed as one of the greatest films ever made, he sets a film around
a strip club which is hands down the least sexy one you’ll ever go to. Most people
question their life choices when they end up at a strip club; when the
performers are dressed as schoolgirls, dancing to Leonard Cohen you actually
question to creator. The Sweet Hereafter, for which Egoyan was nominated
for directing and writing is based on a Russell Banks story that tells the
story of how a bush crash in a small town led to lawyers defending the families
and finds a community unable to heal. Felicia’s Journey tells the story
of an Irish teenager who travels to England to find the boyfriend who is the
father of her child and ends up in a bizarre relationship with a catering manager
and son of TV chef, played by the late Bob Hoskins. Ararat is the story
of how a young man recounts how his life was changed during the making of a
film about the Armenian genocide. Even when Egoyan makes films that are theoretically
sexual there are always disturbing undertones, such as with Exotica and Where
The True Lies: sex for Egoyan is just something that is a cover for deeper
insecurities.
Chloe is wiser and
more experienced that Catherine and its clear as to what she wants from this from
the moment this gets started. She is so clear and unemotional in every aspect
of her life that when in the final third of the movie her lies become unraveled
- by Catherine, not by Chloe - that we find ourselves questioning what’s
happening. So much of what we see in the film is the kind of material you would
expect from a 1970s porn film and I imagine there very well may be some with
similar plots. The reason it’s clearly not porn is that we’re asking questions
even after the film ends.
At one point she
asked how she can relate to her clients, who might seem unattractive or
repugnant. She makes it clear she has rules and they include gratifying the
client’s desires if he can pay and she doesn’t feel in danger. How does she
endure it? “I try to find something I can love.” So the question is what does
Chloe want from this? We’re no more sure of it at the end of the film than we
are at the beginning. We know nothing about her backstory during the movie and
that’s clearly a deliberate choice by Egoyan. In his review of the film Ebert
says Egoyan “never reveals all of the motives, especially to his characters.” Is Chloe acting out a fantasy of her own? Is
this wish fulfillment on her part? Is what happens in the final act of the film
a role play she’s wanted to do her whole life but never got the courage to
until now? Is all of this her a case of her wanted to be the client for once?
The movie comes to a
conclusion that may appear arbitrary to some and unsatisfying to others. That’s
keeping with how Egoyan tells this story. Despite the fact that Chloe gives the
opening narration she’s the only character at the end of the film we don’t
understand. I think that’s the right decision by Egoyan.
This is where I
should tell you that the husband David is played by Liam Neeson. While this
movie was being made his wife Natasha Richardson was hospitalized with a skiing
accident that led to the brain injury that killed her a few days later. Neeson
returned to the set not long after, the filmmakers changed the script accordingly
and two days later he left the set. I don’t know whether this means anything or
not but there’s a direct change between the kind of work Neeson did before and
after Chloe. Most of the movies Neeson did were, as you might know, period
dramas not just Schindler’s List but the title roles in Ethan Frome, Michael
Collins and Kinsey. He was making action films among this, of
course, even before Taken he’d played Henri Ducard in Batman Begins and
Qui-Gon in Phantom Menace. After he finished Chloe he essentially
has leaned full-force into the action hero level of his career and only
occasionally (Widows, Mark Felt) have we even got hints of the great
actor he once was.
It's a pity because
even in his small role in Chloe you get a sense of the everyman he was.
Neeson was close to 60 but still remarkably goodlooking even then and he plays
the kind of husband and father. David is the kind of professor who teaches classical
music and you can believe he’s a good teacher as well as possibly unfaithful.
The scene where David and Catherine have it all out on the table is one of the
best in the film because its as much about Catherine’s insecurities rather than
David’s and both Neeson and Moore handle it perfectly. There’s a critical scene
where Chloe is in the same room with Catherine and David and he has to tell us
everything with his expression and tone. He does so perfectly.
Seyfried spent much
of the next decade, perhaps inevitably, being caught in the kind of foolish
rom-coms that Hollywood only seems capable of producing for women her age or
comedies that were beneath her (her work with Seth McFarlane is the obvious example)
Every so often, with a movie like First Reformed or A Mouthful of Air
would we get a hint of what was beneath the surface that openly warm look. As you might expect she had to go
back to TV to find the work that was worthy of her, first in a small but critical role in Twin Peaks:
The Return, her incredible role as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout and
then as an investigator trying to get the truth of the mattered in The Crowded
Room. I expect greater roles for her
on television in the years to come and that the Oscar nomination she got for Mank
is far from her last.
This film is about Chloe
and yet she remains as much a cipher at the beginning as the end. That’s the
right decision. Egoyan, as Ebert says, is more interested in voyeurism that the
sexual experience and that is the nature of the filmgoer. And we know were just
looking at the surface that is not what appears to be. It’s a tangled web he weaves
and it is not the thing you’d expect from a film that got the description as a -knockoff
of a straight to video film from the 1990s’ even by some prominent critics. That’s
what Chloe looks like on the surface. There’s a lot more beneath.
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