Every year, there are Oscar-bait films: stories designed to play on the emotions and sentimentalities of a voting body that seem to care more about how artistic a movie feels than actually is. And every year, audiences turn against them as contrived, out of touch and desperate.
Which you’d think could bode poorly for Julianne Moore, star of writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut — at least when it comes to how regular audiences might feel about a performance best described as “psychotically genius.”
Because on its face, the chaotic, carnivalesque community theatre parable presents with all the risk factors: entertainment about the world of entertainment, absurdist high-minded comedy that feels straight out of a New Yorker cartoon, and a main character that reads like a cross between Patti LuPone in Evita and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker.
In short, it’s the kind of thing that might feel designed in a lab to win an Oscar — and therefore, come off as annoyingly self-important to actual audiences when they get to see it. But on that front, there are two bits of good news for The Debut. The first is that this thing is almost definitely going to nab that Oscar. And the second is that it won’t do it by being disingenuous.
Because this is quite clearly one of the most shatteringly good movies of the year; a film that blends comedy, horror and drama so effectively it’s impossible to define it as any one genre. And it’s a movie that does so by showcasing one of the most incredible, and endearing, acting tour-de-forces of a lifetime.
WATCH | The Debut trailer:
The Debut is anchored by Moore’s stunning, unrestrained performance as Mona — despite, initially, seeming as shallow as it gets. A demure housewife with two near-adult children and emotionally immature husband, Mona apparently hasn’t been given the privilege of developing an interior life. Instead, she seems to have spent the past 50 or so years in the painfully simple, almost fableistic role constructed around her.
She makes dinner for an unappreciative family in a house that looks like it was decorated by a cross between Martha Stewart and Doctor Seuss. She goes to weekly cocktail nights with a couple who don’t even pretend to hear her speak. And when she talks, she does so in a quiet, plain, sing-song voice that practically screams “please don’t be mad at me.” Not that she has the confidence to scream about anything, to anyone at all.
That is, until she decides to audition for a community theatre production of Nosy Neighbors — a fictional musical about all the zany inhabitants of a seedy apartment building, in which she would play building super Ms. Danielle.
It’s an obviously good-spirited takedown of plays in the style of 7 Stories and The Dining Room —the ensemble-based, zany-characters-share-a-single-location-type of stories that tend to clog up community theatre calendars. It’s a refreshing specificity only someone familiar with community theatre would know: the perennial struggle to find plays with enough jokes to go around for everyone auditioning.
That is Eisenberg to a tee. Having done community theatre from six years old, he’s spoken about his love for the types of people you encounter there often, and worked on it, too: his 2019 off-Broadway play Happy Talk cast Susan Sarandon as a musical-worshipping suburban housewife, slavishly obsessed with her role in a rinky-dink staging of South Pacific. Like Mona, she is a woman who talks incessantly about her star turn as if she’s Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, though to a husband — and by extension, world — that refuses to notice.
The self-evidently pathetic tragedy of a woman scrambling for meaning and recognition universally denied her is the exact same theme returned to in The Debut. Because as Mona blithers on about her own upcoming role, there’s only one problem: she’s terrible. Comically terrible. Cosmically, incomparably bad in a way that increasingly suggests there’s something deeper, more disturbing wrong with her.
It’s a problem that at first, washed-up, big-fish-little-pond director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) feels he can coach out of her. The bizarre trajectory that follows is better seen than read about, though it’s an obvious homage to films centred on delusional, self-obsessed characters like The King of Comedy, Taxi Driver and, yes, Joker give Moore an infinitely fertile playground to do things most actors only dream of.
And it is all done as her character seeks to find truth in fiction at literally any cost, like a more-than-half-crazed Uta Hagen — the iconic teacher who influenced a generation of actors to invent and know nearly every aspect of their entire character’s life. Even if they only delivered one line.
It is an approach Mona, who starts with no life of her own, takes to the most terrifying conclusion. The kaleidoscopic, astonishing, horribly hilarious journey it takes her on is not quite of the laugh-until-you-cry variety; it’s maybe closer to cry-until-you-laugh. Or maybe do both simultaneously until you forget what you were feeling in the first place.
Absent inner life
Here, Moore portrays a woman whose inner life and self-worth was so completely strangled they appeared to have atrophied into nothing. And then that burst forward with such propellant, stunning force you are nearly blinded by looking at the screen.
It’s largely accomplished by Eisenberg’s tightly efficient, but confidently assured writing, which is both effectively engineered and feels so loose it seems nearly like improvisation; we are given just enough hints at Mona’s backstory without being spoonfed, and allowed to draw our own ludicrous conclusions.
The supporting cast is also uniquely excellent; alongside the heartbreakingly effective two-hander between Giamatti (channelling the tough-mentor success of The Holdovers) and Moore, the Nosy Neighbors cast and crew more than hold her own. Halle Bailey’s casting as the play’s lead lets her showcase her pipes and acting palette. While up-and-comer Eldar Isgandarov, playing easily-cowed assistant Piotr, flexes the comedic muscles he also shows off in the equally incredible Club Kid, which is also playing at TIFF.
The Toronto International Film Festival has launched The Market, where filmmakers and global buyers can connect to package and distribute movies, amid a new era of U.S. protectionism. TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey says it’s unique in North America, having both a film festival and a market happening at the same time.
But again, this is Moore’s show — one where she expands the cliche, male-dominated archetype of unhinged, at-the-fringes desperado with aplomb.
The result is an acting performance for the ages. A chameleonic cycle of transformations that should, and will, go down in the history books. And one that situates her in a uniquely comfortable position when it comes to the Oscars race. Because Moore in The Debut is something to behold, and seems impossible to ignore.
And most importantly, it all seems genuine.
