For those in the film industry and passionate moviegoers, Labor Day weekend signifies more than barbecues and the banks closing. It is also the time of the annual Telluride Film Festival, a prestigious affair that provides audiences a preview of the standout performances and scripts that will soon dominate both awards season and the cultural zeitgeist. This year, Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” a delightfully wacky exploration of community theatre and one woman’s psyche starring Julianne Moore, has emerged as the darling of the Festival. The film is a vessel for precisely calibrated performances that manages to be light-hearted but deeply affecting.
Behind the camera, Eisenberg has established himself as a writer-director concerned with quirky, socially awkward characters rather than large-scale drama. His films tend to be intimate and character-driven — his other features, “A Real Pain” and “When You Finish Saving the World,” were both about connection and the difficulty of establishing it even between people who love one another. In “The Debut,” these themes crystallize and the trite aphorism to “find oneself” takes a literal turn.
The film follows Mona Friedman (Moore), a meek and unassuming housewife who auditions for a small part as the landlord Miss Danielle in a local musical about a kooky apartment building. Her audition is laughably bad, but when off-Broadway veteran Serena Cherry (Bernadette Peters) drops out of the show due to the size of the role, Mona secures the part.
With no theatrical experience other than a stint in church choir as a pre-teen, Mona is at first even worse than miserly director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) could have expected. The crux of the film is their tempestuous relationship, as Jerry becomes the only person in Mona’s life curious about her desires and needs in his quest to elicit even an average performance. The result is wildly counterproductive — Mona becomes a fierce method actor, but her confidence quickly becomes manic as she transforms into a full-fledged diva.
Moore is the undisputed heart of “The Debut,” so much so that she received a spontaneous standing ovation halfway through the film at Telluride — practically unheard of at film festivals. Mona’s transition over the course of the film is something to behold, as her newfound confidence manifests in tone of voice, posture and general physicality. Most notably, though, her performance is in the eyes. Audiences are introduced to a Mona who has been whittled down to a wife and mother, with the subdued voice of a Stepford wife. For the first third of the film, Moore perfectly executes the vacant stare of a woman who hasn’t been for her opinion in many years. But by the film’s second half, her eyes have a frenzied, frantic quality as Mona breaks into apartment buildings and dismantles electrical sockets in an attempt to better inhabit her character.
As Jerry remains sane throughout the course of the film, Giamatti’s supporting performance is much subtler. A fiercely supportive and talented director, Jerry is an ode to the type of passion that can only exist in community theatre, an often underfunded and under-appreciated realm of the arts. “The Debut” is ultimately a celebration of the artistic zeal and talent that exists far away from the glossy screens of Telluride.
As Mona begins to take bigger swings and come into her own as an artist, theatre becomes an escape as the lines between method acting, performance and reality blur. Jerry realizes he has created a monster around the same time audiences do, as Mona begins refusing to say key lines because they “feel wrong” and entering stage-left because stage-right felt “off.” After not standing up for herself for decades, Mona is now pouring all of her stifled character into her role.
This ties into the film’s ultimate short-coming — its lack of closure. The film is intentionally intimate and small in scale, but the result is an absence of catharsis at its end. Does what Mona learned about defending a female character translate to her own life when the curtains come down? Was her own family in the audience at opening night, and is her husband being unfaithful? Do her eyebrows, singed off in an electric mishap, grow back? The film is intentionally dreamlike, but a bit more clarity wouldn’t have hurt.
Similarly, the film drags in the second act as the central conflicts rehash themselves infinitely through repetitive scenes if not explicit montage. This is especially evident given the relatively short, 105-minute runtime, although Moore is so hysterical and delightful to watch that it’s easy to forgive.
Ultimately, “The Debut” is a film about the restorative, cathartic powers of art and what it is to be a cast. The meta-performance within the movie, “Nosy Neighbors,” is a story of community, much like the one Mona finds amongst her new peers.
