“Dynastic decline, incest, madness, death” (The Hollywood Reporter) and the great American actress of our time?
With apologies to Nicole Kidman (and David Thomson), for some of us Julianne Moore reigns supreme as the Hollywood actress of her generation. To a queer audience, Moore’s slow-burning performances in melodramas as trapped women, ambition muffled by society, stir deep chords. First attracting attention with a scene-stealing appearance in Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) and a deceptively memorable young wife Yelena in Louise Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Moore then created one of the great unmitigated female leads of the 1990s in Todd Haynes’s disquieting Safe (1995). Her stark, vanity-free portrayal of hypochondriac housewife Carol White remained vividly etched in the minds of not just audiences but other filmmakers, who sought to tap her special gifts in a succession of variations on that part. Witness The Myth of Fingerprints (1997), Psycho (1998), Magnolia, The End of the Affair, A Map of the World (1999), Far From Heaven, The Hours (2002), and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005). Regardless of the quality of the writing, Moore turned out each with fascinating nuance and aplomb, her characters distinct and inevitably lingering in the mind.
Julianne Moore’s performance in Savage Grace (see also our in-depth review) as Barbara Daly, who has married into the wealthy (and real-life) Baekeland family holds something like a funhouse mirror up to these prior roles. Barbara’s violently rejection of all strictures of middle class life and desperate poses as an aristocratic American abroad serves as an explosion of 1950s melodrama even as it borrows some of its classic effects. New Queer Cinema director Kalin sets it all out in long, stagy scenes to heighten the artificiality of his deluded characters’ self-constructions. But it is Moore’s careening, without-a-net acting that ensures Savage Grace is much more than just a shocker, lit as it is by the fire of one of the great American actresses of this or any time.
- Dominic Leppla, LLGFF Website Co-Editor