In the opening chapter of‘Revolutionary Road’, Richard Yates’ classic 1962 novel of postwar suburban discontent, the young parents of aConnecticut commuter town form acommunity theatre and put in ashow, an initiative meant to show that they didn’t leave their creative ambitions behind when they moved out of the city. The failure of their first performance looms through the rest of the story as asymbol of their thwarted aspirations in adomestic cultural wasteland, and reifies adichotomy still understood in American culture, between city (edgy, striving, artistic) and suburb (family-oriented, stultifying, conformist).
In Jesse Eisenberg’sThe Debut, another community theatre production proves more transporting for adifferent suburban housewife: Mona (Julianne Moore), who tries out for her sleepy New Jersey town’s production ofNosy Neighbors, afictitious musical set in in an apartment building of “New York City – the recent past,” athrowback vision of the Big Apple, with rats in the walls and amultiethnic cast of grouches and dreamers, full of grit and excitement. Mona’s role is Miss Danielle, the building’s tough-broad superintendent – think adistaff Luis, fromSesame Street– who moves the disparate dramas along, costume in abright-red boiler suit accessorised with atool belt, from which atoilet plunger’s handle protrudes like the scabbard of aprop sword.
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As housewife Mona, Moore’s performance is equally athrowback. She’s the other half of the late 20th century city-suburb dichotomy, wearing aquilted housecoat as she cooks perfect meals for her ungrateful teenage children and oblivious husband who just wants to sit on the toilet and do his crossword puzzle in peace. This repressed domestic goddess is arole Moore has assayed before, notably in Todd Haynes films that also play with midcentury archetype. Moore initially gives Mona ameek way of moving and asweet, timid voice, both speaking and singing, that’s maybe an octave down from the apologetic and almost inaudibly high voice she gave Carol White inSafe.
In adevelopment that could also be taken from aHaynes movie, Mona is transformed through performance. Eisenberg stages the early days of rehearsal in swirling wide-eyed single takes as Mona is swept up in the charged anxiety of creative risk and the excitement of her high-energy found family of theatre kid outcasts. Under the demanding tutelage of director and company demigod Jerry (Paul Giamatti, asalt-cured ham), she comes out of hershell.
With her kids about to graduate and leave home, “what’s my motivation” is the question for Mona the mother; it is also the question for Mona the actor, as she goes deeper into character and becomes aMethod pain in the ass. She sheds her inhibitions, trying to live the part of the lonely but plucky Miss Danielle, eventually leaving her family and moving into arat-trap flophouse, like afugitive housewife of the early feminist movement to pursue her new creative vocation. She starts acting like acaricature of the difficult actor: refusing to say lines when she can’t find the truth, arguing with her director, overruling makeup and wardrobe, and disrupting her costars with her diva-like behaviour.
The impossible and self-absorbed Method actor is astereotype everyone knows; Eisenberg’s humour depends on recognition and exaggeration, not satire or absurdity – there’s even afright-wig gag, punctuated by ascream when Mona sees herself in the mirror, like something Lucille Ball would do. Eisenberg is afrequent contributor of “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces toThe New Yorker, and the wayThe Debut exhausts the comic possibilities of each chapter of Mona’s evolution in turn feels very much like amagazine humor piece, written by someone accustomed to sustaining each joke only for the duration of asingle paragraph.
Characterisations are broad, and the bouncy and agreeable tone is not so different from the tone of the stage musical within it; the movie grins its way through tropes so saturated that Eisenberg doesn’t have to explain them, or risk losing anyone. The real city that Mona runs off to is just like the city inNosy Neighbors, araspy-voiced desk clerk and bums on the sidewalk just outside, warming their hands over afire lit in agarbage barrel, an image of urban decline handed down over multiple generations of movies.
The musical, invented by Eisenberg for the film, also demonstrates his facility with the familiar. The lyrics are full of cliched expressions of romantic yearning and punny enjambments; Eisenberg himself plays the character who wakes up next to aflight attendant, like Bobby inCompany, but the bouncy, clever sentimentality is less Sondheim than, say,Avenue Q.
Very much ahomage to Moore’s body of work, the role of Mona is also an elaborately mounted showcase to her talent. Both these elements are most present in acentrepiece sequence that drew applause at early film festival screenings: an improv exercise in which Jerry demands Mona, as Miss Danielle, convince him to hand over arent check – he’ll only do it when he believes her. Exhorted by Jerry to go deeper and deeper, Mona’s voice drops, her shoulders bristle, her internal monologue unblocks until Miss Danielle’s deep pathos shoots loose in aflorid and desperate torrent – over the course of about three minutes, Moore goes fromSafetoMagnolia.