Dec. 05--Lots of fine actors win Academy Awards for movies that are not their best. Sometimes it's simply ... their time. Decades of respect and accumulated good will, film after film of strong, versatile work whatever the script quality, can lead to the right showcase at the right moment.
Case in point: Julianne Moore. She plays an early-onset Alzheimer's patient in the drama "Still Alice," which opens this week in New York and Los Angeles before its wide release in January. It appears likely to hand the actress not just her latest Academy Award nomination but her first Oscar.
Whatever the film's merits or limitations (we'll talk in January, come the Chicago release), there is a widespread, warmhearted feeling regarding Moore, who turned 54 this month. This round, this time, appears to be hers. Already she has garnered awards from various critics groups, including the Gotham Independent Film Awards and the National Board of Review.
In the movie she portrays a Manhattan linguistics professor whose memory starts slipping, and before long her world becomes perpetually undiscovered country. At the Toronto film festival screenings of "Still Alice," many were reduced to teary puddles by the story and by Moore's unflinching honesty.
In its way, the film is roughly as formulaic as the big-budget "Hunger Games" sequel, "Mockingjay -- Part 1," in which Moore plays the underground leader of the revolution. Both types of projects offer some room for a clever actor to maneuver and to tell the truth. In "Mockingjay," dealing with a largely expository role, she keeps you guessing; her reserve and almost comic stoicism (there's wit in it, so the tinge of comedy works) engage the viewer in a guessing game. Is this character what she seems? Or less? Or more?
The critic David Thomson described Moore's performance as the tormented Douglas Sirkian homemaker in the Todd Haynes film "Far From Heaven" as "brilliantly passive." That phrase gets at part (though not all) of what she brings to her work. She doesn't have to do much to be compelling; for starters, she doesn't look like many or anybody else in contemporary film, with all those freckles and the photogenic luminosity that screams "L'Oreal!" She is, in fact, a frequent face in L'Oreal ads.
Her early career shared little in common with that of "Hunger Games" co-star Jennifer Lawrence. When Moore was Lawrence's age, she hadn't yet gotten onto "Days of Our Lives" or played Ophelia at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She was a long way from film stardom. Then, in the early and mid-1990s, Moore's stage-trained talent found the material and the directors able to make a difference.
Naked from the waist down in some longish scenes in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," it was easy to notice her. But the real breakthroughs -- the first-phase Moore performances that were, I think, Oscar-worthy -- came with Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street," one of the few great Chekhov adaptations on film that we have, and another sterling artifact, the Todd Haynes film "Safe," from 1995.
Rightly so, "Safe," one of the lasting achievements of its decade in American independent film, is getting the Criterion Collection treatment and will be released in both DVD and Blu-ray Criterion editions next week. What Thomson said about Moore's work in "Far From Heaven" applies more directly to Moore's marvelously opaque performance in Haynes' story of a malaise-clouded San Fernando Valley homemaker in 1987 America. The woman, Carol White, appears to be afflicted by an array of environmental factors borne of everyday chemicals, from dry cleaning to car exhaust.
But there is much more going on, at least obliquely. Her marriage and her relationships with her stepson, her mother and her friends exist in a fog. Her house is too large, too clean, too perfect. She drinks a lot of milk. Is it the milk? Is there any one thing making Carol sick to her soul? When "Safe" came out, Wes Craven, who made "A Nightmare on Elm Street," called the film one of the scariest he'd ever seen.
In its initial release, "Safe" was characterized as an AIDS parable and as a fiercely ironic, sad/funny depiction of a woman on the edge of environmental forces beyond her control. Both are true, partly. But like the heavily routinized, intellectually untaxed protagonist of Chantal Ackerman's film "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," Moore's Carol lives her life as a half-empty proposition. She is, as a New Age flier in the movie suggests, "allergic to the 20th Century." Moore makes her plight more than an object of pity by letting us read Carol in multiple ways. The character's happiness and self-knowledge are both perilously milky, yet there's not a speck of condescension in the interpretation.
Moore once told James Lipton on "Inside the Actors Studio": "I never care that (my characters) are 'strong.' I never care that they're even affirmative. I look for that thing that's human and recognizable and emotional. You know, we're not perfect, we're not heroic, we're not in control. We're our own worst enemies sometimes."
She grew up all over the place, relocating constantly with her military judge father, an American, and her Scottish mother. She recently told a British journalist: "I can see how Americans misconstrue British reserve, and I can see how British people misconstrue American enthusiasm. I think I'm somewhere in between the two."
Often, her laugh, a big one that comes bursting out at unexpected times and places within a scene, conceals a seed of regret or pain in her character's psyche. Watch her in "Safe," now 20 years old, and you see a good actress becoming a first-rate one, in the role of a woman who isn't smart, exactly, who isn't dumb, exactly, whose illnesses are external, internal or both. She is a riddle but not a cipher, because Moore is there, figuring her out without answering a single question.
"Still Alice," a far more conventional effort, may be her ticket to the golden statuette. But if it hands Moore her a fourth nomination and a first win, I'd like to think it'll be for what she did in "Safe."
mjphillips@tribpub.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
