Saturday, November 16, 2024

Movies I Found While Looking For Porn: Chloe (2010)

 

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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