New York Film Festival Review: In ‘The Debut’ Rent’s Due, and Julianne Moore Collects

No actor alive can laugh and cry at the same time with the astounding impact of Julianne Moore. Since comedy and tragedy are the two best reasons for going to the movies, and she is in every scene of her new picture, she alone is worth the ticket.“The Debut” is a brisk dramatic comedy about a New Jersey housewife, Mona (Moore), whose husband and teenage children have stopped noticing her. She auditions for a community theater musical called “Nosy Neighbors,” despite having never acted. When the Broadway actress originally cast withdraws, the director (Paul Giamatti) takes a chance on her, in the role of Miss Danielle, a building super with the catchphrase “Rent’s due!” This “thankless tertiary character” transforms Mona, unraveling the rest of her life.I have admired Ms. Moore since I met her in Kips Bay in 1997, shortly after the birth of her son with Bart Freundlich. Mr. Freundlich was a childhood friend with whom I once devised scenes in a Pennsylvania garden, wearing Spiderman masks knitted by my nanny, and who had just directed her in “The Myth of Fingerprints.” What I remember is the self-deprecating curiosity, entirely without pretension.Those are traits she lends Mona, whose idea of method acting is to bind a tool belt round her waist to “become” Miss Danielle. Ms. Moore’s own tools are subtler. Her sea-glass green eyes hypnotize. Her Titian-red hair travels through a dizzying range of styles and colors, including a Liza Minnelli pixie crop, jet black and lacquered flat to the skull. Her skin metamorphoses from translucent pale to a scarlet that floods her chest and cheeks, apparently summoned on cue. Her 65 years have carved lines into a face that, in close-up, summons the eighty-odd films behind it: Carol White, a woman allergic to her own life, in Todd Haynes’s “Safe” (1995); Amber Waves, the porn actress who mothers everyone around her, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” (1997); a predator who believes she is a romantic in Mr. Haynes’s “May December” (2023). She is always entirely in the moment — as present as a tightrope walker who has just felt the wire go slack.As Mona’s stage director, Mr. Giamatti plays mentor-destabilizer, the role Edward Norton had in “Birdman” — the uncompromising professional who tells the amateur the truth, breaks her down, and tries to put her back together. His timing is perfect, never more so than in a barked coffee order: “Mocha, hold the milk!” At the film’s premiere he called watching Ms. Moore pretend to be a bad actress “the most entertaining thing ever.” Her reply, immediately after: “Anyone could have done this part.”The New York Film Festival premiere of ‘The Debut.’ Via Sebastian DoggartThe problem with the film is its auteur, Jesse Eisenberg. This is his third outing as director, after “When You Finish Saving the World” (2022), which also starred Ms. Moore, and “A Real Pain” (2024). “It is autobiographical,” he has said. “I did community theater, and the people there made me feel so very special, just like what happens to Mona.” As a theater man he will have played the improv game “yes, and…” often enough, which may explain his protean appetite. He writes, produces, directs, and acts in the film, and composed words and music for seven original songs.Alas, as a writer he is not up to the task he set himself — a tragicomedy about a woman who discovers too late that she can make art of real integrity. His characters are thinly drawn caricatures who rely on heavyweight performances to conceal the inanity of the dialogue. Nor is he a great wit: I counted about six laugh-out-loud moments, all prompted by Ms. Moore and Mr. Giamatti. The screenplay might have benefited from a harder look by Emma Stone, who has produced all three of his films and whom he has called his “fairy godmother.”The songs are pastiches of New York musicals like “Company” or “Rent.” I could hum none of them on the train home, though Ms. Moore’s fine voice alchemically turns one into a near-showstopper: “This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out).”Nor does the film seem to know what it is. It is a mash-up of Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman” (1996), which mines community theater for comedy, and — once Mr. Eisenberg tilts into a dark third act — Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” (1982) and David Lynch’s two portraits of actresses losing their marbles, “Mulholland Drive” (2001) and “Inland Empire” (2006). But none of Mr. Eisenberg’s characters has the depth or weirdness of Rupert Pupkin, Corky St. Clair or Diane Selwyn. By telling the story solely from Mona’s waking point of view, Mr. Eisenberg forecloses the oneiric dimension and the dread that might make us fear for her. Pedestrian cinematography and clunky staging doom it further into mediocrity.Nevertheless, it is a delightful vehicle for one of the most technically accomplished actors of our time, and the runaway favorite for the Academy Award. As of Friday, Polymarket put her chances at 71 percent, against 18 for Inde Navarrette in”” Obsession” and 7 for Sandra Hüller in “Rose.” This would be Ms. Moore’s second Oscar, after winning for her heartbreaking performance as a disintegrating academic in “Still Alice.”For those more interested in seeing her perform than collect gongs, the future is brighter still: three films shooting or in post-production, including Tom Ford’s “Cry to Heaven” and Sharon Maguire’s “The Joy of Sex”; a Lynne Ramsay picture after that; and a return to the New York stage in 2027, her first in twenty years, in the title role of Sarah Ruhl’s “Faydra.”“The Debut” does offer consolations. Mr. Eisenberg has made a film that cannot keep up with its leading lady, and for 105 minutes that is enough: a woman discovering far too late what she is capable of, played by an actress who has spent forty years proving she can.

New York Film Festival Review: In ‘The Debut’ Rent’s Due, and Julianne Moore Collects

New York Film Festival Review: In ‘The Debut’ Rent’s Due, and Julianne Moore Collects

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